The U.S. Treasury Department’s claim of a “secret deal” between Iran and Al-Qaeda, which had become a key argument by right-wing activists who support war against Iran, has been discredited by former intelligence officials in the wake of publication of documents from Osama bin Laden’s files revealing a high level of antagonism between Al-Qaeda and Iran.

Three former intelligence officials with experience on Near East and South Asia told IPS they regard Treasury’s claim of a secret agreement between Iran and Al-Qaeda as false and misleading.

That claim was presented in a way that suggested it was supported by intelligence. It now appears, however, to have been merely a propaganda line designed to support the Barack Obama administration’s strategy of diplomatic coercion on Iran.

Under Secretary of Treasury David S. Cohen announced last July that the department was “exposing Iran’s secret deal with Al-Qaeda allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory.” The charge was introduced in connection with the designation of an Al-Qaeda official named Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions.

The Treasury claim has been embraced by the right-wing Weekly Standard and others aligned with hardline Israeli views on Iran, as primary source evidence of an alliance between Iran and Al-Qaeda.

But Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia, told IPS the allegation of a “secret deal” between Iran and Al-Qaeda “has never been backed up by any evidence that would justify such a term” and that it is “a highly misleading characterisation of interaction between Iran and Al-Qaeda….”

Pillar said the recently released bin Laden documents “not only do not demonstrate any agreement in which Iran condoned or facilitated operations by Al-Qaeda, they contradict the notion that there was any such agreement.”

“I’ve never seen anything that suggests that happened,” said another former intelligence official, referring to an Iran-Al Qaeda agreement. “I’m very sceptical about that.”

A third former intelligence official said Treasury’s “secret deal” claim “doesn’t pass the BS test” and noted that it is perfectly aligned with the Obama administration’s policy of pressure on Iran.

The official said the Treasury Department’s push for its “secret deal” line is emblematic of a larger split in the intelligence community between those for whom intelligence is secondary to their role in “counterterrorism” policy and the rest of the community.

“The counterterrorism types are like used car salesmen,” the former official told IPS. “They are always overselling something. They have to show that they are doing important work.”

The actual text of the Jul. 28, 2011 “designation” of Yasin al-Suri suggests that the claim of such a “secret deal” is merely a political spin on the fact that Iran dealt with al-Suri on the release of prisoners.

It says that Yasin al Suri is an Al-Qaeda facilitator “living and operating in Iran under agreement between Al-Qaeda and the Iranian government”. Iranian authorities, it said, “maintain a relationship with (al-Suri) and have permitted him to operate within Iran’s borders since 2005”.

The designation offers no other evidence of an “agreement” except for the fact that Iran dealt with al-Suri in arranging the releases of Al-Qaeda prisoners from Iranian detention and their transfer to Pakistan.

The official notice of a 10-million-dollar reward for al-Suri on the website of the “Rewards for Justice” programme under the Diplomatic Security office of the State Department also indicates that the only “agreement” between Iran and Al-Qaeda has been to exchange prisoners.

“Working with the Iranian government,” it said, “al-Suri arranges the release of al Qaeda personnel from Iranian prisons. When al Qaeda operatives are released, the Iranian government transfers them to al- Suri, who then facilitates their travel to Pakistan.”

Neither the Treasury Department nor the State Department, which joined the February 2012 press briefing on the reward for finding al- Suri, referred to the fact that Iran had been forced to deal with al- Suri and to release Al-Qaeda detainees in order to obtain the release of the Iranian diplomat kidnapped by Pakistani allies of Al-Qaeda in Peshawar, Pakistan in November 2008.

In one of the documents taken from the Abbottabad compound and published by West Point’s Counter-Terrorism Center last week, a senior Al Qaeda official wrote, “We believe that our efforts, which included escalating a political and media campaign, the threats we made, the kidnapping of their friend the commercial counselor in the Iranian Consulate in Peshawar, and other reasons that scared them based on what they saw (we are capable of), to be among the reasons that led them to expedite (the release of these prisoners).”

In response to the IPS request for clarification of the “secret agreement” claim, John Sullivan, a spokesman for the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, declined to answer any questions on the subject or to allow IPS to interview Eytan Fisch, the assistant director of the Terrorism and Financial Intelligence office.

In briefing journalists on al-Suri last February, Fisch had again invoked the alleged Iran-Al Qaeda “secret agreement” last February.

Sullivan defended the Treasury Department’s position on the issue, however, against criticism based on the publication of the bin Laden documents. “We based our action on Yasin al-Suri on a broad array of information that far exceeds what was recently made public,” Sullivan said in an e-mail to IPS.

Asked about the hint by the Treasury spokesman that department officials used still-classified material as the basis for the claim of a “secret agreement”, former national intelligence officer Pillar called it “disingenuous”.

The origins of the Treasury Department’s “secret deal” claim indicate that it was intended to generate press stories that would increase political and government support for pressure on Iran through economic sanctions and military threats.

The designation of Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions Jul. 28, 2011 did not have any impact on Al-Qaeda funding. The objective was to allow Treasury to generate press coverage of its charge of a secret Iran-Al Qaeda agreement. The timing of the move coincided with a shift in Obama administration strategy from diplomatic engagement to maximising pressure on Iran.

During the period when neoconservatives were pushing for an explicit policy of support for regime change in Iran during the first George W. Bush administration, U.S. officials frequently talked as though any Al-Qaeda presence in Iran was evidence of Iran’s cooperation with the terrorist organisation.

But as ABC News reported on May 29, 2008, Bush administration officials were acknowledging privately that they were not complaining about Iranian policy toward Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran, because Iran had “kept these al Qaeda operatives under control since 2003, limiting their ability to travel and communicate”.

One official said Al-Qaeda officials under Iranian control, “some of whom are quite important,” were “essentially on ice”.

Israel has continued, however, to use its relations with friendly news media, especially in the UK, to generate disinformation about alleged joint Iranian-Al Qaeda planning for terrorist actions.

Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News carried a story Feb. 15, 2012 citing “intelligence sources” from an unnamed state as suggesting that Iran had been supplying Al-Qaeda with “training in the use of advanced explosives” as well as some funding and a safe haven “as part of a deal first worked out in 2009….”

The report quoted the intelligence sources as saying that Iran wanted to use the threat of Al-Qaeda retaliation against Western targets as “revenge for any military strike against Iran’s nuclear capabilities”.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

On Wednesday, the United States intelligence community unveiled a first-ever assessment of global water-security issues.

The assessment predicts that water in shared basins will increasingly be used as political leverage. Credit: UN Photo/Ky Chung

According to one of the assessment’s lead authors, Major General Richard Engel, water-stressed countries, being forced to focus on pressing internal issues, are increasingly unable to support U.S. policies and strategic interests.

While the assessment does not foresee water being a main instigator of state-to-state violence or state failure in the next decade, beyond that “water in shared basins will increasingly be used as leverage.” In addition, “water shortages and pollution probably will harm the economic performance of important (U.S.) trading partners.”

The Global Water Security assessment is the result of a request made by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2011. Clinton has previously stated that water and sanitation constitute the two most basic of development priorities.

The end result of the intelligence community’s research is not a comprehensive global look at the issue. Rather, it focuses on seven river basins between the Nile and the Mekong for which there is a “clear intersection of risks of availability and U.S. strategic interests”, according to Casimir Yost, the director of the Strategic Futures Group at the National Intelligence Council, which authored the report.

At the public launch of the assessment, Engel admitted, “The intelligence community went into this project reluctantly. When we looked into it, however, we realised that this was a top-level national security issue.”

For the United States, he suggested, one of the opportunities in the coming decades will be to make available to the rest of the world the country’s expertise in water management.

Indeed, doing so has increasingly become a U.S. priority. The assessment comes on the heels of the creation, in March, of the U.S. Water Partnership, a public-private body likewise devoted to mobilising U.S. water-related knowledge.

There is general agreement that the U.S. does have a role to play in, for instance, providing and fostering scientific understanding on global water-related issues, particularly as water-related issues could become increasingly politicised in the future, leaving the data open to manipulation.

Still, there is disagreement about how exactly the United States should engage beyond this role.

Some suggest that the United States needs to get its own house in order before feeling confident in offering too much advice to the rest of the world.

“In the U.S., we have very serious concerns about how we have managed out own river systems,” says Alexandra Cousteau, a filmmaker and advocate associated with National Geographic.

“The U.S. has indeed made significant contributions in these issues in the past,” says Ellen Laipson, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a think tank here in Washington.

“But now we have to think global: we have to remember that we’re here to solve the problem, not to accrue influence. We have to make sure that these discussions are not limited to Washington.”

Laipson notes that the U.S. government has long had a tendency to be overly reliant on a world vision that focuses on national governments.

“It’s tricky to write this (assessment) within the U.S. government,” she says, “because officials tend to overlook local-level administration as well as supranational bodies.”

According to both Laipson and Cousteau, supranational bodies – such as those made up of governments and stakeholders from throughout a river basin – have proven to be particularly adept at making decisions that balance national security interests with those of local livelihoods and rights.

Cousteau focuses particular emphasis on lower-level bodies.

“Oftentimes, we don’t give enough credit or support to local communities who are coming up with solutions to water-related problems,” she says. “Collectively, these groups are having an impact on water-security issues in their countries – and they can have an even larger impact if they are empowered.”

She also warns that the new intelligence community assessment puts too little concern on the degradation of rivers as systems, including the ecologies and human communities that depend on the health of the system overall.

“It’s these systems, these wetlands, that act as buffers for many of the larger security issues that we’re discussing,” she says. “These river systems mean prosperity for many people.”

Interestingly, history bears out such a view. Despite the omnipresent importance of freshwater systems through the centuries, the historical record suggests that water issues – including water scarcity – have more often than not been grounds for cooperation rather than conflict, including in the modern age.

In a seminal 1998 paper, researcher Aaron T. Wolf wrote that during the 20th century “only seven minor skirmishes” took place, and “no war has ever been fought over water. In contrast, 145 water-related treaties were signed in the same period.”

“These patterns suggest that the more valuable lesson of international water is as a resources whose characteristics tend to induce cooperation, and incite violence only in the exception.”

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 9 2012 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama Wednesday declared his support for same-sex marriage, becoming the first sitting president to do so and thrusting the issue into the centre of his campaign for re-election.

Analysts here described Obama’s new position as politically risky, a point that was underlined by Tuesday’s approval by 60 percent of voters in North Carolina of an amendment to the state constitution affirming that only marriage between a man and a woman is legally recognisable.

North Carolina, a critical swing state in Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential elections, joined 29 other states, including other key battleground states in November, such as Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Colorado, with constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriages.

At the same time, however, the move could help mobilise Obama’s Democratic base, and the polling during the period of his presidency has shown growing support for gay marriage. A Gallup poll released Tuesday found that 50 percent of respondents favoured legalising same-sex marriage and 48 percent opposed.

“Many political handicappers won’t be able to resist criticising Obama for picking a fight in the culture-war terrain that evangelical-strumming, Karl Rove-types have been trying to tease out for years,” wrote Steve Clemons on his widely read Atlantic blog.

“But President Obama is not prone to emotional leaps of faith and knee jerk shifts in policy. Their polls must show that the nation is ready to have this fight – that most independents and Democrats think same-sex marriage should be a civil right,” he added.

Asked about Obama’s stance, his all-but-certain Republican challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, reaffirmed his opposition to the idea.

“My position is the same on gay marriage as it’s been …from the beginning, and that is that marriage is a relation between a man and a woman,” he told a radio interviewer in Denver. “That’s the posture that I had as governor and I have that today.”

But gay and human rights groups praised Obama for speaking out.

“Today, President Obama made history by boldly stating that gay and lesbian Americans should be fully and equally part of the fabric of American society and that our families deserve nothing less than the equal respect and recognition that comes through marriage,” said Joe Solomonese, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the most prominent U.S. lobby group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans- gender (GLBT) issues.

“Following in the footsteps of predecessors who brought the nation forward on racial equality, this is a signature example of a president leading the people in a direction that is right and inevitable, even though some may not feel ready for it,” said Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of the U.S. chapter of Amnesty International (AIUSA).

Obama, who has long supported equal rights for gays and lesbians and who abolished the Bill Clinton-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy that required homosexual U.S. servicemen and women to hide their sexual preferences in order to remain in uniform, announced his position during an interview with ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ to be aired Thursday. He said that his views about same-sex marriage and LGBT rights in general have evolved over time.

“I’ve always been adamant that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally,” Obama said in the video that was released Wednesday.

“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbours, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married,” he said.

Obama was put on the spot on the issue on Sunday, when his vice president, Joe Biden, told the widely watched “Meet the Press” public affairs television programme that he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage, a position that was immediately endorsed by Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan.

Same-sex marriages are recognised in six states – including New York and, ironically, Romney’s Massachusetts, which became the first state to grant marriage licenses to LGBT couples in 2004 – and the District of Columbia. The legislatures of both Washington state and Maryland have also approved laws granting same-sex marriage licenses, but they may be challenged by proposed referendums in November.

California legalised same-sex marriages in 2008, but voters in a referendum in November that year overturned the law.

Historically, state governments have determined who may legally marry, although the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 declared state miscegenation laws – laws prohibiting inter-racial marriages – unconstitutional.

In 1996, conservatives in Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act which, for the first time, defined marriage under federal law as a union between a man and a woman.

The upshot of that law has been the denial by the federal government of a variety of benefits, such as Social Security, health insurance, and even hospital visitation rights, to LGBT couples who, if legally married, would be eligible to receive them. Same-sex “civil unions”, a status short of legal marriage, are recognised by a contract.

In 2010, a federal court in Massachusetts held that the denial of such rights and benefits to same-sex married couples in that state was unconstitutional, a ruling that is currently under appeal and may yet reach the Supreme Court.

In 2008, Obama expressed support for “civil unions” that have been passed by a number of states to provide individuals in longstanding same-sex relationships with the same state benefits and rights that are accorded legally married couples. But federal rights and benefits were still denied them.

In explaining his evolution, Obama stressed the religious roots of his thinking, noting that he had talked with his wife, Michelle, about this “over the years. …(I)n the end, the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people, and, you know, we are both practicing Christians, and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others, but …when we think about faith, …what we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule – you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Excerpt:

With U.S. federal funding sources for renewable energy sources already drying up, coupled with a newfound antipathy towards “green” issues issue here in Washington, some are suggesting that China could offer an important opportunity for the future of renewables in the United States and around the world.

A wind farm outside Tianjin. China is the world's leading manufacturer of wind turbines and solar panels. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

While the U.S. and China have been vying for the top spot in spending on green technologies in recent years, China looks set to make massive gains – or at least spend massive amounts of money – in the near future.

The Chinese surpassed the U.S. in wind turbine deployment in 2009. By 2020, the country is supposed to have more solar energy-related infrastructure than the rest of the world combined.

As part of its latest five-year development plan, Beijing has also defined a list of seven strategic emerging industries to receive “special treatment” adding up to some 1.7 billion dollars in government investment. According to Allen, six of those seven areas deal with energy issues.

Allen’s presentation came a day after a high-level British government official made a similar announcement, urging the British private sector to use China as an “incubator” for the development of new green technologies.

“There are big opportunities to partner with Chinese companies and pioneer new technologies in the Chinese market,” John Ashton, the U.K. government’s special representative on climate change, said on his return from an official trip to China. “That will cost you less and get your prices down … faster than it would elsewhere.”

U.S. companies are facing a similar spectrum of concerns. While the United States continues to lead globally in terms of coming up with new innovations in renewable energy, the issue of how to proceed beyond that phase has become increasingly problematic.

According to a study released in late April by the Brookings Institution, state-backed support for the U.S. clean energy sector is set to drop by 75 percent, from 44.3 billion dollars in 2009 to just 11 billion dollars.

While much of this defunding is coming from government programmes that are scheduled to sunset in coming months, in the lead-up to the 2012 U.S. presidential elections green tech has become highly politicised.

In particular, the issue of “wasted” government spending has been strongly linked to funding for renewable energy, making it almost impossible to assume that significant U.S. government support for the sector will be continuing.

While none of this sounds a death knell for renewables in the U.S. in the long term, the uncertainty is making investors highly skittish about dealing with the sector for the time being. In turn, that’s gumming up the pipeline for new and potentially important innovations.

“U.S. companies have inventions that they can’t get off the shelves – they can’t deploy them here, they can’t get financing for demonstration projects,” says Joanna Lewis, an assistant professor of science, technology and international affairs at Georgetown University here in Washington.

“Whereas in China, often they can get these projects built in a short amount of time, get them up and running, and allow investors to get a sense of how viable they are. Then, they can bring that technology back to the U.S. or other markets.”

Lewis, speaking along with Allen and others at a panel discussion at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars here, highlighted the examples of LP Amina, and engineering company, and several car manufacturers, which she said have successfully used this model.

“I think there’s a lot of merit in the idea of the United States working with China to test out technologies and approaches that for whatever reason have the potential to work better or faster in China but that would benefit the U.S. economy,” Nigel Purvis, a visiting senior associate with the Center for Global Development here, told IPS.

“The key, of course, is ensuring that such programmes do in fact benefit U.S. companies and workers, and working out strong intellectual property arrangements is essential.”

Indeed, there are notable and well-documented obstacles to any attempt by foreign entities to invest in China, over and above the tricky politics. As Purvis notes but in a view held by many, the issue of intellectual property remains one of the most sensitive.

According to Craig Allen, many of the investment regulations in place in China today appear to constitute “a mechanism that the Chinese government uses to facilitate the transfer of technology” to its own state-owned entities.

Such chicanery has turned some entrepreneurs off completely. “I don’t think American companies can work in China,” says Jigar Shah, president of the coalition for Affordable Solar Energy. “I find the whole notion of American companies working in China in a way that is in any way meaningful to be ridiculous.”

Shah notes that there is tremendous and growing opportunity in many countries in Africa, as well as India and Brazil. “All of these places are safe to do business,” Shah says. “There’s just no need to work with China.”

Still, other observers note the possibility of achieving a studied balance.

“I am very bullish on ‘co-opetition’ between the U.S. (or Europe) and China in the clean tech space, but we can’t be naive about it,” Peter Adriaens, a professor of engineering and of entrepreneurial strategy in the Business School at the University of Michigan, told IPS.

“Western companies have to not just look at ‘the huge market’ – a simplistic view – but clearly understand China’s long-term strategy to make considered decisions,” Adriaens continues. “Not doing so has already shown to negatively impact the value of East-West partnerships.”

By Aline Jenckel
UNITED NATIONS, May 9 2012 (IPS)

For centuries, indigenous peoples and their rights, resources and lands have been exploited. Yet long overdue acknowledgment of past exploitation and dedicated efforts by indigenous peoples have done little to end or prevent violations of the present, stated indigenous leaders in the Manaus Declaration of 2011.

The declaration, part of preparations for the upcoming U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, frequently referred to as Rio+20, in June, recounted the “active participation” of indigenous groups in the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and similar efforts in 2002 that led to the adoption of the term “indigenous peoples” for the United Nations (U.N.) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Despite this work, “the continuing gross violations of our rights…by governments and corporations” remain major obstacles to sustainable development, the declaration continued. “Indigenous activists and leaders defending their territories still continue to be harassed, tortured, vilified as ‘terrorists’ and assassinated by powerful vested interests.”

As Rio+20 approaches, IPS interviewed Tom B.K. Goldtooth, who has been an activist for social change in Native American communities for more than three decades and is the executive director of Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), an alliance of indigenous peoples that combats the exploitation and contamination of the earth and will participate in the Rio+20 conference.

Goldtooth called for a “new paradigm of laws that redefine humanity and its governance relationship to the sacredness of Mother Earth and the natural world”.

The activist explained that the most effective measures for reducing deforestation, protecting the environment from unsustainable mineral extraction and preserving a better world for future generations are to strengthen international, national and sub-national frameworks for collectively demarcating and titling indigenous peoples’ territories.

U.N. Correspondent Aline Jenckel spoke with Tom Goldtooth about the main threats faced by indigenous peoples and how the Rio+ 20 conference could be a success.

Q: At the Rio+20 conference in June, you will speak on behalf of indigenous peoples and their human rights, in terms of protecting their natural environment and creating sustainable development. What is the key message you hope to convey? A: The thematic discussion of green economy and sustainability creates differences in views between the money-centred Western views and our indigenous life-centred worldview of our relationship to the sacredness of Mother Earth.

Many of our indigenous peoples globally are deeply concerned with the current economic globalisation model that looks at Mother Earth and nature as a resource to be owned, privatised and exploited for maximised financial return through the marketplace.

With this development model, indigenous peoples continue to be displaced from their lands, cultures and spiritual relationship to Mother Earth, and destruction to the life-sustaining capacity of nature and the ecosystem that sustains us and all life continues as well.

For the sake of humanity and the world as we know her, to survive, there must be a new paradigm of laws that redefine humanity and its governance relationship to the sacredness of Mother Earth and the natural world.

This includes the integration of the human-rights based approach, ecosystem approach and culturally- sensitive and knowledge-based approaches. The world must forge a new economic system that restores harmony with nature and among human beings.

We can only achieve balance with nature if there is equity among human beings.

At Rio+20, global governments must look cautiously at any green economy agenda that supports the commodification and financialisation of nature and take concerted action to initiate the development of a new framework that begins with a recognition that nature is sacred and not for sale and that the ecosystems of our Mother Earth have jurisprudence for conservation and protection.

Full recognition of land tenure of our place-based indigenous communities are the most effective measures for protecting the rich biological and cultural diversity of the world.

Q: What are the biggest threats to Indigenous people’s livelihoods today, and how can they be addressed? A: Indigenous peoples from every region of the world continue to inhabit and maintain the last remaining sustainable ecosystems and biodiversity hotspots in the world.

Destructive mineral extractive industries continue to encroach on indigenous peoples’ traditional territories. Unconventional oil and extreme energy development, with the real-life effects of climate chaos, are directly affecting the wellbeing of indigenous peoples from the North to the Global South.

Indigenous peoples can contribute substantially to sustainable development, but they believe that a holistic framework for sustainable development should be promoted.

With the knowledge that development that violates human rights is by definition unsustainable, Rio+20 must affirm a human rights-based approach to sustainable development.

Particularly, the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples must serve as a key framework which underpins all international, national and sub-national policies and programs on sustainable development with regard to indigenous peoples.

Q: Recently, some non-governmental organisations (NGOs) expressed deep concern about the reversals on agreements made by governments in 1992 and say there’s no country taking leadership of or acting as a visionary role in the conference. Do you believe there is still hope for new, binding commitments? A: Because of the climate chaos, financial instabilities and ecological devastation, the world doesn’t have an option to reverse the agreements made in 1992.

World leaders must remember the active participation of indigenous peoples in the Rio Earth Summit (UNCED 1992) and the parallel processes indigenous peoples organised, which resulted into the Kari- oca Indigenous Peoples’ Declaration.

Agenda 21 embraced the language of Kari-Oca that recognised the vital role of indigenous peoples in sustainable development and identified Indigenous Peoples as a Major Group. Rio+20 must reaffirm the commitments made by UNCED to indigenous peoples in 1992.

Excerpt:

It’s happening in Buenos Aires. It’s happening in Paris and in Athens. It’s even happening at the World Bank headquarters.

The global economy is finally shifting away from the model that prevailed for the last three decades. Europeans are rejecting austerity. Latin Americans are nationalising enterprises. The next head of the World Bank has actually done effective development work.

Maybe that long-heralded “end of the Washington consensus” is finally upon us.

After the near-collapse of the global financial system four years ago, obituary writers rushed to proclaim the death of the prevailing economic philosophy known as neo-liberalism. It was a tempting conclusion.

Except that Big Money never received the obituary notice. After some minor tweaking of Wall Street practices, some bailouts of enterprises deemed too big to fail, and the injection of some stimulus spending to arrest the free fall, Washington continued with business as usual.

The IMF and the World Bank, meanwhile, didn’t fundamentally change their policies. And the European Union, led by tight-fisted Germany, continued to back austerity. All the major economic actors held to the old orthodoxy even though it flew in the face of common sense and common decency (though not in the face of the bottom line).

Wall Street’s continued irrational exuberance, its lavishing of bonuses on its elite, and its pushback against even the most modest of regulations all suggest that the old Ptolemaic system – with Wall Street and the Washington Consensus still at the centre of the universe – had not yet given way to a Copernican revolution that displaces these powerful institutions from their privileged position.

Such revolutions, of course, are not made in a day. Remember: Ptolemy’s system, with the earth at the centre of all things, reigned for 1,300 years even as it grew inordinately complex to explain new astronomical observations. A century after the publication of the great Pole’s theory of heliocentrism, Galileo still ran afoul of church authorities for his Copernican leanings. Orthodoxy dies hard.

As a first sally against the prevailing orthodoxy of neo-liberalism, today’s economic Copernicans have taken aim at austerity. It’s a fat target: belt-tightening, after all, is not only unpopular but unsound.

Nowhere is that clearer than in Europe. There, the case for austerity, explains Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, “was that once governments began slashing their spending and deficits, markets would reward them by investing in their presumably more productive economies. But the reverse has happened. As Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain have cut their budgets, investors have grown less willing to buy their bonds. By plunging themselves deeper into recession, these nations have convinced investors not that they’re fiscally virtuous but that they won’t become economically viable for many more years.”

French and Greek voters rejected austerity in the elections this weekend not because, as the U.S. media coverage implies, they are unruly children who refuse to swallow their medicine. Rather, they realise that austerity economics at this delicate moment could very well precipitate a double-dip recession (i.e.: a lot more pain).

Moreover, they want the pain – and everyone knows that there will be pain – to be fairly shouldered. Francois Hollande, the new Socialist president in France, has called for a 75-percent tax rate on all earnings over 1.3 million dollars. Now that’s a Buffet tax! Hollande is also emphasising job creation and public investment.

The left has woken from its collective stupor just in time, for Europe at the moment is very much up for grabs. The far right has also rejected austerity, and it has a much simpler platform: blame the immigrants.

The National Front in France has injected its xenophobic virus into the very heart of France’s center-right Union for a Popular Movement; the street thugs of Golden Dawn in Greece will enter parliament for the first time; Geert Wilders and his anti-Islamic chest-thumpers brought down the government in the Netherlands last month.

Much rests on the shoulders of Hollande and the French Socialists. To them falls the responsibility of rebuilding a European left that returns the EU to its roots – a socialist market economy that grows together and preserves unity in diversity. To pull France out of its own doldrums, Hollande can’t think small. He must go big and, through persuasion and arm-twisting, rewrite the rules of European economic revival. Rejecting austerity is only a first step.

The Europeans could learn something here from Latin America, particularly Argentina. In the late 1990s, having racked up a huge debt, Argentina faced the typical recommendations from the international financial institutions: cut the budget, privatise government firms, remove barriers to outside investment. But Buenos Aires said no. It defaulted on 100 billion-plus dollars in loans.

According to the rules of the game, Argentina should have been thrown out on its ear and forever banned from playing in the global casino. But that didn’t happen. Most creditors – 93 percent – eventually accepted the 35 cents on the dollar haircut that the government offered.

With a bit of luck – particularly the rise in price of soybeans, a key Argentine export — the country clawed its way back to economic health. Unemployment dropped from 25 percent in 2001 to below eight percent in 2010. Social programmes reduced the percentage of the population living beneath the poverty line from 51 to 13 percent (though it went up again in 2010).

The recovery, like all recoveries, is tenuous, for it depends a good deal on the price of the commodities Argentina exports.

Which is why Argentina is going one step further to exert some control over the process. The government of Cristina Kirchner has nationalised Argentina Airlines as well as pension funds, and it has also instituted measures to slow capital flight from the country. Most recently, it nationalised a key oil company, YPL, taking back control of the firm from a Spanish company that had a majority stake.

Argentina is by no means the only country in the region to roll back the privatisation mania. The Brazilian government increased its control over the oil company Petrobras a couple years ago. In Bolivia, the government of Evo Morales recently renationalized the electricity grid, which had also been in Spanish hands. Venezuela and Ecuador have also adopted similar policies.

Despite this new trend in Latin America, foreign investors have been flocking to the region. In 2011, the region saw a 31-percent increase in foreign capital.

But here’s the underlying reason for the nationalisations. According to a recent U.N. report, “FDI revenue transferred back to the countries of origin has increased from 20 billion dollars per year between 1998 and 2003 to 84 billion dollars between 2008 and 2010 per year.”

Finally, there’s been change at the World Bank. The new head Jim Yong Kim is a health professional, not a free-trader like Robert Zoellick or a neocon like Paul Wolfowitz. Under Jim Kim’s more grassroots- oriented approach, perhaps the World Bank can help shift the locus of attention from facilitating financial speculation to empowering the poor.

A backlash against austerity in Europe, a move toward greater state control in Latin America, a change in leadership at the World Bank: this might seem slender evidence for a Copernican revolution in economics.

Moreover, a number of leaders like Barack Obama are styling themselves as Tyco Brahe, the Danish astronomer who attempted to combine both Ptolemy and Copernicus into an untenable geo-heliocentric system. These modern-day Brahes want to preserve the Washington consensus with only a few modifications.

As the world lurches from one economic crisis to another, and with the even larger crisis of global warming looming above it all, one thing is certain: there is no longer any consensus in Washington over what to do. Neo-liberalism survives, but more out of inertia than conviction.

Meanwhile, out there in the world, the economic Copernicans are busy reconstructing the order of things.

*John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.

By Haider Rizvi
UNITED NATIONS, May 8 2012 (IPS)

Leaders of the world’s 370 million indigenous people are urging governments not only to replace laws that violate the natives’ rights to protect their lands, resources and culture but also to introduce legislation that protects their rights.

At the 11th session of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which began here on Monday, these leaders took leading global powers to task for using old but still existing laws as a weapon to justify the exploitation and abuse of indigenous communities.

“(We) have the right to redress for past conquests,” said Tonya Frichner, a Native American activist and lawyer who has also been a member of the Permanent Forum. “This is enshrined in the (United Nations) Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples.”

The Declaration was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 2007. According to Article 3 of the historic declaration, indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. Article 28 protects their right to redress for past conquests while Article 37 explains the right to agreements.

Established by the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in 2000, the forum is comprised of 16 independent experts who provide advice and recommendations on indigenous issues to the U.N. system.

A long history of oppression

Indigenous leaders hold that the laws of settler governments that target indigenous populations emanate from the so-called “Doctrine of Discovery”, an issue that has become focal point of discussions at this year’s forum meeting.

Frichner said the legal systems based on the doctrine of discovery began in the 1500s with Christian Western Europe deciding that people who are Christian have the right to claim land inhabited by non- Christians

“This doctrine is the juridical foundation for the domination of indigenous people. It’s the moral foundation for domination,” she added. “Domination is exhausting not only for those who are dominated, but for those who dominate,” laying foundations for racism and sexism.

In interviews with IPS, several participants appeared particularly concerned about the ongoing exploitation of natural resources buried in and around native territories worldwide and state authorities’ open support for the logging and mining corporations that are taking these resources.

“520 years and the doctrine of discovery is alive and well,” said Marlon Santi, who travelled all the way from the Amazon in Ecuador. “This is about extremism, genocide, land grab(bing) and even slavery. All of this is happening in the name of (the) Christian God and development.”

“The oil company, Chevron, has polluted our river. Phillips has invaded our territories. Amazon is the lifeline and the mother of our people,” he said. “In our region, nothing much has changed. The present government is as bad as the previous one.”

Santi, who faces sabotage and terrorism charges for leading resistance against the incursions of big oil and coal corporations, said the Ecuador government gave four million hectares of indigenous lands to foreign companies this year – without obtaining informed consent from the native communities.

Some participants also worried that if the wider acceptance of the doctrine of discovery was not challenged effectively, the progress that the global indigenous rights movement has made over the past two decades would come to a halt.

Saving culture

“Through the continued use of non-indigenous languages, terminology and perspective in describing the doctrine of discovery, we may inadvertently encourage the reproduction of such perspectives amongst our own peoples,” said activist Arthur Manuel from Canada.

“It’s a multifaceted concept. It’s a legal fiction. It promotes exclusion, racism, discrimination and alienation from decision-making processes and invisibility within the same institutions,” he observed.

It has been observed in past U.N. meetings that language barriers often caused frustration among activists hailing from indigenous territories. At these meetings, the discussion takes place in English and French, which are often laden with a heavy dose of legal jargon and technical terms alien to the indigenous participants..

“Indigenous legal and judicial systems exist today. Our knowledge systems exist today. Indigenous languages continue to be spoken,” said Manuel. “We will continue to assert our rights as described in the U.N. Declaration and in our own indigenous laws.”

Since discussions at the U.N. forums are almost completely dominated by the non-indigenous government representatives, the Global Caucus of indigenous peoples recommended that a seat in the General Assembly be established for the indigenous peoples. In an interview, former chair of the forum, Mirna Cunningham, forcefully defended the indigenous peoples’ call for governments to bring about legislative reforms that protect and respect indigenous peoples’ economic, social, political and cultural rights.

“[We] are trying not only to challenge the conventional model of development, but also to make people understand that if they listen to our point of view on development, they can also change the situation globally and locally.”

Of all the U.N. member states, only Bolivia and Cunningham’s country of Nicaragua have incorporated the principles enshrined in the declaration of the indigenous peoples’ rights into their national laws.

The discussion on this will continue until end of the meeting on May 18.

An indigenous group in the Amazon rain forest took its anti-oil message to Canada in a case rife with accusations of social and environmental damage that highlights the issue of securing consent prior to commencing exploration operations.

View of the Amazon rain forest in San Martín, Peru. An indigenous community there is accusing an oil company of social and environmental damage. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

“The communities affiliated with FENAP reject the presence of the company” and have no interest in the “additional help or benefits” that Talisman can offer at the risk of environmental contamination, Ayui said.

During three previous visits to Canada, the indigenous leader has issued this message, in some cases meeting directly with Talisman management. The most recent trip featured discussions with government opposition leaders and members who expressed “solidarity” with FENAP’s aim to shut down the Calgary firm’s venture into its homeland, noted Ayui, buoyed by legislators’ resistance to the activities in the Amazon.

The delegation was accompanied by Amazon Watch, a San Francisco-based non-profit organisation that supports indigenous people and aims to protect the rain forest. Discussions with key stakeholders and interested parties in Canada took place from April 21 to May 8.

Talisman, however, shot back at Ayui’s trespassing claim and pointed to the Peruvian government’s permission to engage in oil exploration in certain regions.

Moreover, FENAP lands are based 25 kilometres east of the oil company’s activity area known as Block 64, said media relations adviser Berta Gomez, adding that her employer has used about 115 hectares for exploration activities representing .015 percent of the total area. The oil giant started working in the block in 2004.

“We respect that some communities are opposed to oil development and we will not work there,” Gomez emphasised.

Obtaining consent

While Amazon Watch purports to represent the voice of the Achuar in Peru, it actually speaks only for the FENAP, an Achuar federation comprised of a number of communities opposed to Talisman’s activities, she argued.

Within Block 64, the energy interest has won the support and approval of the FASAM and OSHAM Achuar federations, added Gomez, referring to two new offshoot organisations. Overall, she said, Talisman has agreements with eleven organisations representing 66 directly and indirectly affected communities, more than 1,800 families and five different ethnic groups.

“We are committed to early and ongoing engagement with all stakeholders to share plans and address concerns,” including key authorities, the ombudsman and third-party representatives who act as observers, she said.

Ayui, the FENAP leader, said he has asked that Talisman President and CEO John Manzoni attend a meeting in the Amazon where his company is exploring, but the company has requested discussions be held in a nearby town, requiring the indigenous group to travel for three days.

Gomez confirmed that a March 30 meeting took place for the first time among Talisman’s country manager and corporate affairs manager and indigenous leaders against oil and gas development in San Lorenzo, Peru, with a promise to attend a local indigenous assembly, probably in May, to establish a final agreement regarding land boundaries.

The case spurs important questions about the nature of free, prior and informed consent, which is rooted in the United Nations (U.N.) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, according to a 2011 report by Sustainalytics, a sustainability research and analysis company headquartered in Amsterdam.

The report questions what exactly constitutes the consent of affected indigenous communities – a band council resolution, a referendum, the agreement of community leaders or the approval of all constituents?

Complicating matters is the fact that the Peruvian government awarded concessions and blocks to oil companies without consulting or informing the Amazonian communities, which it has traditionally regarded as “second-class citizens”, states a report published last year by the Ottawa-based think tank, the North-South Institute.

Fostering strife among communities

Among the FENAP’s objections, moreover, is a claim that Talisman triggered social problems within the Amazon’s indigenous population.

FENAP leaders raised grievances with the Peruvian courts about Talisman’s creation of “conflicts and divisions” in connection to a May 2009 confrontation among Amazon groups that “almost ended in violence,” Ayui recalled, but there has been no response. Demands that the Peruvian Congress force the company to vacate the rain forest have also been unanswered.

In his view, the energy firm’s exploration operations have torn apart communities, as eight have opted to sign agreements granting permission to work on their land in exchange for development assistance, while 44 have not.

Based on the needs of federation leaders, Talisman offered “social contribution programs” to improve living standards, Gomez, the spokeswoman, said. Last November, she noted, Talisman signed social community agreements with 11 federations, providing $3 million in resources to fund education, health care, access to electricity, capacity building and local job-generation initiatives in 2012.

Despite the oil firm’s investment in communities, Gregor MacLennan, Amazon Watch’s Peru program coordinator, questioned its interpretation of gaining the free, prior and informed consent of indigenous peoples. He accused the company of winning approval in any way it can – even after indigenous groups initially say no – by presenting more money and resources.

For its part, Talisman has always engaged with all stakeholders in a direct and peaceful manner in full adherence to human rights principles, Gomez stated. However, she said, the oil firm also asks that “the rights of the people to choose to work with us, in an open and transparent fashion, also be respected”.

Talisman plans to maintain dialogue efforts with federations and communities opposing its activities.

Damaging the environment

Rounding out indigenous allegations against Talisman is environmental contamination. The Calgary firm touted new technologies with no risk of repeating the damage done by oil industry players operating in the Amazon in the 1970s and 1980s, but Ayui refuted the claim.

The exploratory wells have affected his community’s hunting and fishing grounds by producing waste which leaks into streams during the rainy season, he charged, and poisons birds and other animals. His people’s ancestors also died on the lands Talisman is now exploring, he added.

MacLennan told IPS that he addressed the drilling fluids issue during a February meeting with Talisman, which acknowledged the problem but explained it will take “several months” for the arrival of a subcontractor and the adequate equipment to undertake the clean-up to a specific standard, a task that includes correcting the poor waste-disposal job carried out by another oil company in the past.

Talisman meets, and in many cases surpasses, environmental regulations outlined by the Peruvian government, Gomez insisted. Waste products, or cuttings, are normally generated during drilling activities and have been “properly managed and stored according to environmental regulations and protection measurements” dictated under the oil firm’s environmental impact assessment, she said.

During the drilling of oil wells, the waste is stored in a “cuttings pit” complete with a roof to shield against rain water and a pit bottom protected with a “geomembrane” to prevent the direct contact of soil and waste, she noted, adding that the whole drilling pad is surrounded by an external ditch collecting fluid, mainly rain water, before it is released into the environment.

During Talisman’s drilling activities, known as SC3X and SN4X, there were no environmental incidents or claims from communities in the area of influence of its operations, Gomez said.

Talisman incorporates an indigenous environmental monitor from the local communities during the drilling projects. The monitor performs daily environmental inspections, immediately communicates problems, participates in monthly environmental monitoring and field environmental audits by regulatory agencies, helps to supervise the handling and shipping of waste and takes part in the abandonment activities and reclamation works, she added.

The company’s abandonment plan for the SC3X project, which details techniques for the treatment and final disposal of cuttings and an outline for re-vegetation and reclamation of the area, is awaiting Peruvian government approval, Gomez said.

Still, Amazon Watch and the FENAP are dissatisfied with Talisman’s environmental precautions and explanations. They dismissed oil companies’ tendencies to blame damage on subcontractors or on the challenges of working in the rain forest.

As the Canadian energy firm heads into a production phase within the next year, there are concerns that a potential spill due to human error would render the area “virtually irrecoverable”, MacLennan warned, spawning “an environmental disaster” destroying the livelihoods of thousands of people in the rain forest.

What is a journalist to do when simply providing information is not enough to bring about the desired change? Why, turn to art, of course.

Untitled photo, evoking water torture. Credit: Courtesy of Shahidul Alam

“The information is clearly in the public domain, but when it doesn’t do what you’d hoped it would do, you need to re-think your strategy,” Alam told IPS in New York where he had come for the exhibition launch last month, in an attempt to highlight the urgency of internationalising the issue.

“I didn’t know how effective this show would be, but I wanted the issue to be seen in a different context,” he said.

The result is a series of beautifully lit, symbolic images in a show titled “Crossfire”, which just concluded a run at the Queens Museum in New York– “a physical experience that aims to evoke rather than inform,” as Alam puts it in the exhibition brochure.

In so doing, the show raises a human rights issue that is relevant to any state that allows extra-judicial murders to take place with impunity.

“Through Wikileaks, we learnt that the U.S. and UK have been involved in training RAB. Hopefully this exhibition will provide food for thought about U.S. special training being provided to Bangladesh security forces,” says Alam, a pioneering photojournalist and activist, founder of the multimedia Drik Picture Library and the not- for-profit photo agency Majority World.

“Water-boarding was a new concept for us in Bangladesh,” he added.

In addition to training, the U.S. and Britain have also been providing arms to RAB. The issue has been raised in the British Parliament, but not in the U.S., something Alam hopes will change.

When it was first launched in Dhaka in March 2010, the Bangladesh government sent riot police to shut “Crossfire” down, on its opening day – an action seen around the world as the organisers strategically live-streamed the event. Alam recalls that he was in fact on a Skype call with the Reporters Without Borders secretary general when the riot police surrounded the gallery.

The widespread negative publicity and protests at the exhibition being shut down highlighted the issue and led to an initial decline in “crossfire” killings. However, since then, disappearances as well as killings have risen.

Although symbolic rather than literal, the photographs evoke a dark, sinister feel. An underwater photo with bubbles, a cycle rickshaw on a deserted university road, a rice paddy field, a ‘gamcha’ (sarong) on the ground…

Combine these images with the word “crossfire” in the context of Bangladesh, and you have a clear political statement about extra- judicial killings in that country.

“This one’s clearly about water-boarding,” commented Pramilla Malick of Manhattan, stopping in front of the water bubbles photograph at Alam’s show. “It gives me the chills.”

“The idea of the concept of ‘crossfire’ rather than showing bodies is very potent,” said documentary filmmaker Brian Palmer, who has been to Bangladesh and worked with students at Alam’s Drik institute. “We’re so bombarded by an avalanche of images that it can be more powerful to interrupt and pause.”

Each photograph represents an actual case, based on solid research about every known case of crossfire death.

Each photo was taken in the middle of the night, lit by torchlight, “because that’s how survivors and victims’ families recall these incidents,” says Alam. “They take place in the dead of night, people wake up to torchlight shining in their faces, and then they’re taken away.”

“Even a child knows what ‘crossfire’ means,” comments a passer-by, whom Alam video-interviewed outside the gallery after the government shut down the show in Dhaka.

“You use these images with that word, everyone will know that that’s where a crossfire happened,” comments a policeman.

One passerby angrily says that “those putting on this show are the ones who should be ‘cross-fired'”, because the police are “only trying to make the country safer for the citizens by getting rid of criminals”.

However, most passers-by commended the organisers for bringing this issue to the public. “Those who are killed are not just criminals,” said one young man. “Some are just ordinary people on their way to work, their families never even get their bodies back.”

The interviews, playing on a subtitled video, are part of the Crossfire show at Queens Museum.

The exhibition in Dhaka and in New York is supported by the Open Society Institute, which also funded a series of posters based on the images that human rights organisations in Bangladesh had agreed to exhibit.

However, NGOs all backed out at the last minute, says Alam, perhaps due to fears that the Bangladesh government would not renew their licenses to operate as non-profit organisations.

Drik, an independent media organisation that is not subject to such restrictions, has persisted with the exhibition. “We’re also risk- takers,” grins Alam.

In a country where the risks of speaking out include being “cross- fired”, taking such chances is no laughing matter. But for activists like Alam, staying silent is not an option.

Given the likely persistence of political pressure to reduce the yawning federal deficit, the United States – whether under President Barack Obama or his presumed Republican challenger, Mitt Romney – must be more selective in its foreign aid programme, according to a new report released here Tuesday by two influential think tanks.

The report, a joint production of the Center for Global Development (CGD) and the Center for American Progress (CAP), calls for re- allocating bilateral economic aid to increase support for 32 high- priority and generally well-governed countries, while curtailing assistance to 51 others.

It urges a similar weeding out process among the 134 current recipients of U.S. security assistance, of which only 45 should be considered high-priority and thus eligible for increased support.

“The United States must make hard choices about where to invest its resources,” according to CGD’s Connie Veillette, who co-authored the report with John Norris at CAP, a think tank from which the Obama administration recruited a significant number of its top foreign policy and aid officials.

“Foreign assistance works best in countries that embrace policy reforms and are committed to working with the United States as partners,” she added.

The nearly 300-page report, “Engagement Amid Austerity,” also calls for Washington to focus its aid efforts on three areas in which the U.S. has a “comparative advantage”: health, food security, and the delivery of humanitarian assistance, particularly given the Pentagon’s quick-reaction capabilities.

The report urges upper-middle-income recipients of Washington’s nearly eight-billion-dollar-a-year President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) programme, including several southern African and Caribbean countries, to assume more responsibility for its cost and operations.

And it calls for a major overhaul of Washington’s food aid programme to allow for more local and regional food purchases instead of insisting that almost all food aid be exported from the U.S. itself aboard U.S. ships.

The report also recommends the establishment of a bipartisan International Affairs Realignment Commission that would present a comprehensive package of reforms to be accepted or rejected in toto by the new administration and Congress. Such a mechanism was used successfully several years ago to decide on the politically hypersensitive issue of which military bases to close.

While the report, the product of consultations of a 15-member bipartisan working group over the past six months, does not recommend any reduction in the U.S. international affairs and aid budgets, it assumes that political and fiscal realities will force cuts, regardless of who wins the November presidential race.

“It is far easier to demonise foreign aid than to explain how relatively modest programmes to improve living standards in the developing world have consistently proven to be in the national interest over the long term,” according to Veillette.

The current Republican-backed budget plan in the House of Representatives, authored by Rep. Paul Ryan and endorsed by Romney, calls for cutting the foreign affairs budget by more than 30 billion dollars from 2012 levels over the next four years – or by some 10 percent a year – in contrast to the steady increases it mandates for the Pentagon.

In determining how to more effectively allocate U.S. diplomacy and aid in times of austerity, the task force considered multiple variables for each country recipient, including GDP per capita, net development assistance per capita, military expenditures, and country scores on half a dozen multinational indices designed to measure different aspects of governance, such as Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, and the Human Development Index.

In addition, it considered more subjective factors, such as short- and long-term strategic interests, political support, and the traditional strength of the bilateral relationship. It also considered the degree to the role of multilateral assistance programmes to which the U.S. contributes.

All recipient countries were then divided into three categories for both economic and security assistance.

The first two include those considered “priority investment countries”, for which continued or increased aid was warranted; and those considered to have “limited expectations”, for which aid would continue based largely on short-term imperatives, such as geo- political concerns.

The last category is those to which aid should be curtailed for any of three reasons – because they could be “graduated” from assistance within one to five years based on declining need and growing capacity; or because aid programmes there were too small or expensive to operate effectively; or because their performance, especially in the area of governance, was too poor to justify continued aid except for humanitarian reasons or to support local civil society.

Of the 103 countries currently receiving economic assistance, the report found 32 qualified as “priority investment countries”; among them, Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Mozambique, Senegal, South Sudan, Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines, Tunisia, the Palestinian Territories, Bangladesh, Nepal, El Salvador, and Peru.

It also cited Mali but noted that the recent military coup d’etat probably disqualified it.

Limited expectation countries included, among others, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Kazakhstan, Bolivia, Ecuador, Haiti, Cuba, and Mexico.

Among countries where aid could be curtailed, the report cited Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Nigeria in Africa; Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka in Asia; Brazil, Colombia and the islands states of the Eastern Caribbean in the Americas as those which could be graduated from U.S. aid programmes.

Laos, Timor-Leste, Morocco, Guyana, and Jamaica were among those which were considered either too small or too expensive to operate, but the report noted that aid could continue in these countries with a minimal U.S. presence.

Among the “poor performers” were Angola, Cameroon, Sudan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Several Central Asian states, Afghanistan, and Pakistan also fell into this category, but the report stressed that the U.S. could continue providing economic aid – albeit reduced from current levels – to the latter two through a proposed “strategic fund” that would be administered separately by the State Department.

Among the 45 “priority investments” for U.S. security assistance, the report cited most of the same countries deemed priorities for economic aid, including Nigeria, South Africa, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Russia, Turkey, Israel, and Colombia.

“Limited expectation” countries included Ethiopia, Mozambique, Vietnam, Alteria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Yemen, among others, while countries which can “graduate” from U.S. security aid include India, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Malaysia, Singapore, among others.

“Poor-performing” countries where aid should be curtailed for reasons of poor governance of human rights abuses include Angola, Bahrain, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka, and Nicaragua, although the report stressed that security-related assistance may continue through the proposed “strategic fund”.

The report stresses the importance of increasing cooperation with other donors, particularly multilateral institutions, in enhancing aid effectiveness and reducing costs and also suggests that Washington develop trilateral cooperations with emerging aid donors, notably India, South Africa, and Brazil, all of whom receive U.S. aid but have also launched their own aid programmes.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Without major reductions in the use of fossil fuels, sunlight is to kill an unknown number of ocean phytoplankton, the planet’s most important organism, a new study reports this week.

Phytoplankton is a vital component in the ocean's food chain, and generates at least half of the oxygen we breathe. Credit: NOAA/public domain

In the not so distant future, sunlight, the very source of life for phytoplankton, will likely begin to kill them because of the ocean’s increasing acidity, researchers from China and Germany have learned.

“There’s a synergistic effect between increased ocean acidity and natural light,” says Ulf Riebesell of the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany.

Riebesell added that it was also possible “phytoplankton could adapt”.

Researchers were surprised to discover that diatoms, one of the most important and abundant types of phytoplankton, fared very badly during shipboard experiments conducted by co-author Kunshan Gao, from the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science at Xiamen University, Xiamen China.

Previous experiments in labs like Riebesell’s found that diatoms actually did better in high-acid seawater, unlike most other shell- forming plankton. Burning fossil fuels has made the oceans about 30 percent more acidic researchers discovered less than 10 years ago. Oceans absorb one third of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from using fossil fuels.

The good news is this has slowed the rate of global warming. The bad news is oceans are now more acidic and it will get worse as more CO2 is emitted. This is basic, well-understood ocean chemistry.

Gao and his team made several trips into the South China Sea taking samples from surface waters where phytoplankton are found. While still on the research vessel, those samples were made as acidic as the oceans are likely to be in 2100 without major emissions reductions (800-1000 parts per million compared to current 392 ppm).

As expected under these conditions, certain types of plankton like coccolithophores did not do well but surprisingly, diatom productivity also declined.

One possible reason was the much brighter natural light on the ship versus that in science labs, Riebsell and Gao suspected. Followup lab experiments with lights mimicking the intensity of natural light in the subtropical zone of the South China Sea confirmed that the combination of high-acid sea water and light intensity was more than diatoms could handle.

Riebsell speculates that diatoms stressed by high-acid conditions can’t cope with the energy they receive from sunlight at the same time. Their study was published May 6 in Nature Climate Change.

“We don’t know at what point the combination of a certain level of ocean acidity and sunlight leads to the decline of diatoms,” he said.

This is just one of many recent studies finding negative impacts as the oceans become more and more acidic.

By 2040, most of the Arctic Ocean will be too acidic for shell- forming species including most plankton. Significant areas of the Antarctic Ocean will be similarly affected, oceanographer Carol Turley from Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK previously told IPS.

The cold waters of the polar regions allow more CO2 to be absorbed faster, turning the oceans more acidic sooner. The oceans haven’t seen a rapid change like this in 60 million years, said Turley.

She warned that global warming is also raising water temperatures and reducing the amount of oxygen in seawater in some regions. This is another potentially dangerous combination.

“Our research suggests the impact of oceanic acidification upon marine plankton could be more serious than previously thought,” said John Beardall from the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University.

Beardall and colleagues from several research centres calculate that without major reductions in CO2 emissions, ocean acidity will have a significant impact on phytoplankton before 2100. Their findings were also recently published in Nature Climate Change.

It’s not just plankton. The large and continuing decline of oysters, both wild and farmed, in the Pacific Northwest have now been linked to increased ocean acidity. Scientists have shown that oyster larvae have difficulty building shells in corrosive waters, according to a study in the journal Limnology and Oceanography published last month.

“For the oceans, the Pacific Oyster larvae are the canaries in the coal mines for ocean acidification,” said Richard Feely, a co-author of the study and senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Fish and other species are showing changes in their growth, behaviour and reproduction, according to other research.

Not only are the oceans big, covering 70 percent of the planet, they are complex. Recent work by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at San Diego reveals there is huge variability in ocean acidity levels.

That makes “global predictions of the impacts of ocean acidification a big challenge,” said Jennifer Smith, a marine biologist with Scripps.

The only prediction Riebesell is willing to make is about the high likelihood of a major decline in the ocean’s biodiversity (number and types of living things) if rates of fossil fuel emissions continue. Roughly 80 percent of all life is found in the oceans.

“Changes in the oceans are happening too fast for most species to cope,” he said. “It’s clear we are conducting a giant experiment on the planet and we don’t know what we are doing.”

In December 1985, The New York Times reported on what was believed to be the first anti-apartheid conference of U.S. high schools discussing divestment from corporations operating in South Africa.

Across the U.S., ethnic minority youth are at the forefront of struggles over immigrant rights and Palestine solidarity. Credit: Courtesy of UNIDOS

In the background, the Times reported, was a mailing by the National Association of Independent Schools “urging the organization’s 1,000 members to ‘declare their opposition to apartheid as part of their educational responsibility’ and to ‘seek out ways to give substance to their declaration.'”

It was no secret that youth 27 years ago were leading the way and school officials themselves were forced to react. The chair of the conference admitted that he and his constituents didn’t want to “preach to anyone” but rather “facilitate a movement that’s going on all across the country”.

Others elaborated on their desire to aid future youth in similar situations. “We’re training future leaders,” Sister Virginia Mary of St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s School told the Times, “who will have to know what responses to make to these issues.”

Today, these “future leaders” can be found in a community-based movement led by youngsters shaking Arizona.

The young students are also shaking the country to its bones with their struggle that is intimately local – while also one that reverberates across an entire nation where anti-immigrant sentiment abounds – to preserve and defend what has long been the sole K-12 Mexican-American Studies (MAS) programme (a.k.a. “Ethnic Studies”) in the U.S., outlawed by Arizona on May 10, 2010.

Asiya Mir, currently a senior at Tucson High Magnet School, is one of the teenagers in the youth activist coalition UNIDOS who made national headlines last April when she and fellow youth chained themselves to Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) board members’ chairs and dais to prevent the board from voting to dismantle MAS.

After a dramatic battle with a mobilised local community, the board finally terminated the programme this past January after state authorities inflicted crippling economic sanctions on the district. The programme’s books were then banned from the classrooms, followed by the recent firing of the MAS programme director and student employees.

Despite the district’s purges, a movement has blossomed and continues to grow.

Meanwhile, these youth are not quarantined around one single issue. Many of the students are international in their vision and commitment to justice.

Mir is also the founder of Tucson High’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a leading force on college campuses which give host to nearly 150 chapters to date, according to national data from the group’s first major conference last October.

“As a student living in a racist state attempting to rob my ethnic studies education from me,” Mir told IPS, “I feel a close, personal affinity with my fellow students in Palestine who live under and struggle against Israeli aggression, terror, and cultural theft.

“I embrace these students as my own; they are me, their struggle is mine,” she said.

Her words might be likened to the outlawed concept of “ethnic solidarity”, in the words of the Arizona State Legislature in HB 2281 (the MAS ban). Mir’s words themselves are a variation of one of the primary indigenous concepts that forms the core of Ethnic Studies known as “In Lak Ech,” – or “Tú eres mi otro yo / You are my other self.”

Mir is not the only high schooler driven by a pursuit of international justice in Israeli-occupied Palestine. All around the country youth carry themselves with remarkable eloquence, moral clarity, and passion on an issue increasingly popular on college – and now high school – campuses.

In Chicago, 15-year-old journalist and habitual tweeter Nadine Darwish quietly convinced her school authorities to offer a cafeteria alternative to Sabra brand hummus.

Sabra is the target of international boycotts because its parent company, The Strauss Group, financially and materially supports two Israeli military units involved in human rights abuses documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the United Nations.

In Virginia, SJP attracted a young amateur archer and aspiring journalist named Mallika Patkar. Virginia-born Patkar, whose parents are originally from India, is a junior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Last summer, she interned in the Washington, D.C. office of Israel’s leading human rights group, B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

Lamiya Khandaker, from New York City, is a first-generation U.S. citizen born to working-class, Bangladeshi parents. She founded an SJP chapter at her school, Brooklyn Technical High School (incidentally the site of a recent controversial Israeli boycott vote), to spread awareness of firm U.S. support for Israel with three billion dollars in yearly military assistance.

“I truly believe that if more American citizens gain more knowledge on this conflict, then we can pressure our government to do something, and if necessary, break our bond with Israel,” she told IPS.

Back in Tucson, Mir’s peer, Denise Rebeil, who also participated in last year’s chain-in at the district office while attending Rincon High School, is now a freshman at Tucson’s University of Arizona (UA). Earlier this spring, Rebeil, with fellow UNIDOS, SJP and other youth activists, wrote a handsigned letter to the UA president regarding a new boycott/divestment movement sweeping the country throughout churches, campuses and communities.

The students, and their lawyers, invited the administration to “negotiate a timetable for full and complete severance (or divestment) from the University of Arizona’s licensing contracts” with the CAT and Motorola corporations for the companies’ role in human rights abuses along the U.S./Mexico border and in Israeli- occupied Palestine.

This particular campaign has raged for three years and has garnered enough publicly incriminating remarks by UA officials to support the country’s first potential divestment lawsuit since the anti-apartheid era if the UA fails to negotiate with them.

There’s no telling what these students will do if school authorities fail on their part to “facilitate a movement that’s going on all across the country”. One thing is certain: history cautions that students’ dedication and persistence not be taken lightly. These students are rising to the occasion. And they know it.

There’s a bold assurance in the words and actions of these youth. As young Nadine joyously reflects, “There’s no greater feeling than standing on the right side of history.”

*Gabriel M. Schivone, from Tucson, AZ, has a column in the “Latino Voices” section of Huffington Post. Follow him on Twitter @GSchivone.

President Barack Obama meets with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan following a session of the G-20 Summit in 2009. Credit: Official White House photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 7 2012 (IPS)

Major changes that have swept both Turkey and its neighbourhood since the Cold War require Washington to forge a “new partnership” with Ankara, according to a new report released Tuesday by the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Among other steps, U.S. President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan should use their close relationship to create a government-wide forum for regular, cabinet-level bilateral consultations like Washington’s Strategic and Economic Dialogue (SED) with China or its strategic-level exchanges with Israel, according to the report by a blue-ribbon task force of 23 members.

Co-chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former national security adviser Stephen Hadley, who served under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, respectively, the task force also called for building much stronger economic ties between the two countries by possibly negotiating a bilateral free trade agreement and taking other measures.

While conceding that Washington will disagree with Ankara on a number of important issues, including the pace and direction of political reform inside Turkey and Ankara’s relations with Israel, the report concludes that “it is incumbent upon policymakers to make every effort to develop U.S.- Turkey ties in order to make a strategic relationship a reality”.

“To do otherwise would be to miss a historic opportunity to set ties between Washington on a cooperative trajectory in Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, and Africa, for a generation,” according to the 90-page report, “U.S.-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership”.

The report comes amidst a growing – albeit slow – appreciation here for Turkey’s emergence over the past decade as a global economic powerhouse, evidenced by its membership in the Group of 20 (G-20), and as a regional superpower with significant influence on not just the evolution of the past year’s “Arab Spring” but also the ongoing crisis between Iran and the West, and the future supply of oil and gas from the Caspian and Central Asia to Europe.

Shifting trajectory

During the Cold War, Turkey was largely taken for granted as a loyal – if poor, inward-looking and sometimes repressive – member of NATO whose territory occupied a particularly strategic position vis-à-vis “containing” the Soviet Union.

In the last 20 years, but especially since the accession to power of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002, however, Turkey’s position has changed dramatically.

Economically, its growth rate has been sustained at close to Chinese levels over the past decade; politically, the AKP has significantly weakened the once-dominant military and instituted other democratic reforms; and internationally, Ankara has emerged as a confident and independent actor, even as its loyalty to NATO, as shown by its continuing troop commitment in Afghanistan and its agreement to station an anti-missile radar system on its soil, appears undiminished.

Just last week, one of the most influential U.S. geo-strategic thinkers, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, compared Turkey’s importance to those of Washington’s most powerful NATO allies.

“I would view Turkey personally today as one of the four most important members of the NATO, certainly right there with Britain, France, and Germany,” he said in a lecture at the Brookings Institution. He also argued that Turkey’s political and economic evolution could serve as a model not only for newly democratic Arab states, but also for Iran and Russia.

As both he and the CFR report noted, however, the United States has been slow to recognise its significance.

Standing up to Washington

“The new Turkey …is not well understood by U.S. administration officials, members of Congress or the public,” the report notes, adding that one of the aims of the task force, which included prominent figures representing a broad range of expertise and political views from centre right to centre left, is precisely to build a better understanding of Turkey’s importance.

Indeed, much of the news coverage of Turkey here over the past decade has been negative.

Its parliament’s rejection of Washington’s use of Turkish bases as a launching pad for the 2003 Iraq invasion came as a shock to many here.

More recently, Erdogan’s outspoken denunciation of Israel’s 2008-09 military campaign in Gaza, followed by the Mavi Marmara incident in which nine Turks were killed by Israeli commandos in international waters, sparked a wave of anti-Turkish acrimony promoted, in particular, by neo- conservatives, who had long been hostile to the AKP due to its anti-military positions and Islamist roots.

The major institutions of the powerful Israel lobby have also since quietly retaliated by supporting the Greek and Armenian lobbies against Turkish interests in Congress.

At the same time, human-rights and press-freedom groups here have grown increasingly critical of internal developments in Turkey, particularly the detention and prosecution of dozens of journalists and others in connection with the “Ergenekon” and Sledgehammer” conspiracy investigations of the military-dominated “deep state”, and of scores of activists, politicians, reporters and academics accused of supporting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The new report echoes many of these rights- and democracy-related complaints, noting, for example, that the AKP’s constitutional reform programme has slowed unnecessarily and that the government has sometimes resorted to the “same nondemocratic tools” as its predecessors.

“A potential strategic partner”

Washington, it says, should encourage Turkish leaders to “follow through with their commitment to writing a new constitution that better protects minority rights and basic freedoms”. The Kurdish issue, according to the report, “is among the biggest obstacles to Turkey’s democratic ambitions and the root of many of its illiberal practices”, and Obama should encourage Erdogan to pursue “a new Kurdish opening”.

At the same time, the report insists that some of the fears about the AKP’s direction are exaggerated or unfounded. “In particular, the decline in the role of the military in Turkish political life does not mean that Turkey is inexorably headed toward theocracy or movement away from NATO,” it insists, adding that “the United States must not view the sum of U.S.-Turkey relations through the narrow prism of particular issues, whether they be Armenia, Israel, or ties to NATO”.

“The U.S.-Turkey relationship is much broader than the Armenian tragedy, the parlous state of Turkey- Israel relations, or the false debates about Turkey’s place in the West,” it declares.

Washington “needs to see Turkey as a potential strategic partner with which it has a relationship not only with newer partners, such as India and Brazil, but ultimately with its closest allies, such as Japan and South Korea”, the report adds.

On more specific recommendations, the report suggests that domestic politics in both Israel and Turkey are unlikely to favour any rapprochement in the near future, so Washington should encourage the two countries to maintain what it calls the “one bright spot” in bilateral relations – trade.

It also calls, among other things, for greater U.S. efforts to advance the normalisation of ties between Turkey and Armenia and to contain Ankara’s long-standing territorial disputes with Greece and potential disputes with Israel over gas deposits in the eastern Mediterranean.

While the two countries have differed on a number of fronts and popular distrust of the United States is especially high in Turkey, those differences “should not preclude the development of a partnership, in particular as Ankara has moved closer to Washington’s position on Syria and Iran”, according to the report, which also stressed Turkey’s “constructive” role in Iraq despite its opposition to the invasion.

“They made me drink my own urine,” said one former detainee, Addam Ayedh al-Shayef, describing his experiences in detainment in Yemen. “When I refused to drink it, they electrocuted me. After I came home, I would dream I was still being tortured and I’d wake up screaming.”

Shayef and nearly two dozen other former detainees told their stories to the rights group Human Rights Watch, which released a news report today on the illegal detention of opposition protestors, fighters and sympathisers, and opponents of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh since protests began in February 2011.

Since that time, Human Rights Watch found, people were detained for days, weeks and even months by security forces and usually denied access to attorneys, with no ability to visit with relatives and without adequate food and shelter.

During detainment, prisoners were subjected to beatings, electric shock, death or rape threats, and long periods of solitary confinement.

The organisation spoke with both former detainees and relatives of protestors and opposition fighters. Its report incorporated vivid accounts by former detainees of their experiences in detainment after the group documented 37 cases of arbitrary detainment.

Shayef, 21, said that men he believed to be from the government’s National Security Bureau grabbed him from a street in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, on March 4 of this year. In prisons in Sanaa and Aden, a port city in the south of the country, they repeatedly tortured him for a week.

How many more accounts are similar to Addam Ayedh al-Shayef’s story? According to Human Rights Watch, that fact is difficult to ascertain, due to limited accessibility to public information and little to no access to detention facilities, even though a new transition government is in power.

Security forces and intelligence agencies have even prevented government officials, including Human Rights Minister Hooria Mashhour, and lawyers from accessing detention centers, according to the report. Mashhour said she believed that dozens are still being held in arbitrary detainment, including by opposition forces.

Lip service

In January, Yemen’s transitional cabinet and a military restructuring committee headed by Abdu Rabo Mansour Hadi, who was the sole candidate for and winner of the presidency in February, ordered the release of those arbitrarily detained.

Yet even after this order, about 100 detainees still need to be released. “I honestly think many sectors of the government do not know how many people are being held,” Human Rights Watch spokesperson Letta Tayler told IPS.

Human Rights Watch still managed to gather information and accounts from former detainees, finding that detainees had been kept from a few days to ten months by security and intelligence units that were run by relatives of former president Saleh and even now generally remain outside of the government’s control.

Meanwhile an immunity law enacted on January 21, under the transitional government, gives amnesty to former president Saleh for his political crimes as well as those who served under him during his 33- year rule.

“The law violates Yemen’s international legal obligations to prosecute serious violations of human rights and does not shield officials from prosecution for offenses committed since its enactment,” said the report.

Furthermore, when Human Rights Watch visited Sanaa earlier this year, many local human rights groups and officials said that people were still being detained and kept out of communication, by both government and opposition forces, even as both sides denied doing so.

In the news report, Human Rights Watch called for “the United States, the European Union, and the Gulf states (to) call for the transfer of all detainees to judicial authorities so they can be freed or charged and prosecuted in impartial and fair proceedings”.

“I think many countries around the world want to see stability in Yemen,” said Tayler.

However, Tayler noted, the problem is that there are security concerns, which tend to come first. “What you see happening is there is less focus on human rights because of security issues. Yemen has a very active branch of Al-Qaeda and if there is ever reason for concern, human rights and security can go hand in hand.”

The typical person detained is considered to be from one of four broad categories, said Tayler. These categories include foes of the fallen government, opposition protestors or fighters, or members of government forces; sympathizers, even if they are not protestors; those people who hailed from cities or towns that were flash points of opposition to the government; and fighters from opposition forces.

On Tuesday, the latest round of negotiations begins on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), potentially the largest free trade agreement ever signed by the United States.

Despite claims by the U.S. government of considerable transparency in the process, the talks, being held in Dallas, are covering material that has remained almost completely out of the public’s eye.

“Because the negotiations have been conducted in extreme secrecy, we have no idea yet what is in the text,” says Rashmi Rangnath, a director with Public Knowledge, an advocacy group here in Washington. “What we do know is that lack of transparency tends to skew the text of such agreements in favour of large corporations.”

Although a draft of the chapter on intellectual property rights was leaked in February, much of the rest of the 26 chapters have been kept away from public scrutiny.

Some outside of the negotiations have had significant time with the chapters, however. Early drafts of TPP content have reportedly been discussed at length with large corporate interests, such as 20th Century Fox, which has a key stake in intellectual property-related regulations.

Thus far, the justification for this secrecy has been minimal. “Basically we have been told two things,” Rangnath says. “First, that this is precedent. And second, that this level of secrecy is necessary during negotiations in order to arrive at a compromise.”

The TPP would be a free trade agreement between the U.S. and eight Asia-Pacific countries: Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Canada, Japan and Mexico are also expected to join the talks, although the Japanese have yet to make a final decision on the matter.

In addition, the possibility of future Indian and Chinese participation is being held out as a far-off though, for many, tantalising prospect.

Proponents suggest that, if the TPP passes, it could boost intra- regional trade by more than a trillion dollars per year by 2025.

While the official talks are to be held May 11-13, the full 12th round is said to be stretching from May 8-18. This is an unusually lengthy period for face-to-face negotiations, particularly given that the 11th round took place only two months ago, in March in Australia.

According to observers, the administration of President Barack Obama is pushing for as many such rounds as possible before the end of the year, in an attempt to bull through the far-reaching agreement.

It is unclear whether that timetable is possible, however, as pushback against the TPP has continued in recent months, from both governments and civil society.

Over the past week alone, members of the U.S. government have urged President Obama to alter certain draft provisions of the agreement, while a U.S. business lobbyist has rued a great “gap between the ambitious vision of our leaders and what is being proposed at the negotiating table.”

Longstanding criticism also has yet to abate. Much of this comes from the fact that, for most countries, the TPP would not offer many trade benefits – including, most importantly, greater access to U.S. markets.

Simultaneously, U.S. negotiators are pushing for significant concessions from potential members.

“This is very unusual for a free trade agreement,” says Sean Flynn, director of the Information Justice Program at American University here in Washington. “There is very little ‘carrot'” to counteract some of the more strident compromises.

Flynn points out that Chile, Australia, Singapore and Peru have each expressed public reticence over the current contours of the TPP, given that these countries already have expansive trade agreements with the United States.

“This means that Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia would pay the highest cost,” he suggests.

According to what has been seen from the leaked chapter on intellectual property rights, Flynn warns, the TPP appears to be pushing a “maximalist”, enforcement-focused approach.

This directly counters the “development agenda” that has been evolved in institutions such as the U.N.’s World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), through processes involving significant input by developing countries, outside of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

“The U.S. clearly wants to go beyond international standards on intellectual property – beyond WIPO,” says Krista Cox, an attorney at Knowledge Ecology International, an NGO here in Washington.

For developing countries, some of the most direct impacts of this expansion of punitive powers over intellectual property could be on health issues.

While U.S. global health policy has seen significant strengthening over the past five years, passage of the TPP “would start rolling this back,” warns Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines Program at Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group here.

Worldwide over the past 10 years, prices for HIV-related medicines, for instance, have fallen by 99 percent, largely driven by competition from generic drugs. While the fight against generics by large pharmaceutical interests has largely shifted away from the WTO, Maybarduk suggests, the TPP agreement signals the next iteration of that effort.

“The TPP could well be the worst that we have seen,” Maybarduk says. “Not only does it run contrary to the U.S.’s own pledges on global AIDS work, but the TPP will set the template for the entire Asia- Pacific region. That could have an impact on half of the world’s population.”

By Peter Richards
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados , May 7 2012 (IPS)

By the time small island developing states (SIDS) arrive at the Rio+20 conference in Brazil in June, they will have worked hard to co-ordinate their message to the rest of the world about the importance of sustainable development for their countries.

In a two-day conference, SIDS Achieving Sustainable Energy for All, that began today in Barbados, these countries are preparing for the conference to ensure that their needs do not go overlooked in June.

Freundel Stuart, prime minister of Barbados, said the country believes it is crucial for the Rio+20 conference to not only recognise the structural vulnerabilities of SIDS but also “offer a model to assist us in realising our sustainable development aspirations and create the institutional platform that would enable us to participate in innovative partnerships both regionally and internationally in this process”.

In turn, islands in the African, Caribbean and Pacific must press the international community to honour previous commitments related to SIDS, he added. “It is also essential that SIDS obtain the requisite resources to make renewable energy resources accessible and affordable,” he told the delegates to the United Nations-sponsored conference.

Stuard called the Rio+20 conference a golden opportunity for the SIDS to speak as one and convey the urgency of fully embracing sustainable development and united around a common agenda to ensure its realisation.

“We must use these meetings in Barbados to prepare ourselves for what will be a battle to articulate, promote and defend our interests, to the benefit of our people, and indeed of the planet. The time for talking is over. The time for concrete and concerted action is upon us,” Prime Minister Stuart said.

The United Nations (U.N.) Conference on Sustainable Development, commonly known as the Rio+20 conference, is a follow- up to the historic 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also held in Brazil.

Finding “political entry points”

In the meantime, the SIDS conference, first held in Barbados in 1994, is underway.

Its participants are discussing a number of initiatives, including ensuring affordable and reliable access to modern energy services in SIDS by 2030; energy access, governance and poverty in SIDS; and the role of energy access in relation to economic development.

Stuart told delegates from various SIDS including the Cook Islands, Tuvala and Nauru that the meeting’s proposed outcome document will address the fundamental concerns of SIDS on issues of conservation and sustainable management, or “blue economy”, even though they are not currently reflected in the draft document.

He emphasised that “plans are being developed for a coordinated approach to renewable energy” at the wider Caribbean level, citing an “abundant endowment of renewable energy resources”.

Stuart said that an honest assessment of the international community’s track record on sustainable development leads to the conclusion that while the concept is part of the international lexicon, it remains too amorphous to be properly implemented.

“Sustainable development is still seen fundamentally as an environmental issue while development, as economic growth, continues to be the dominant paradigm,” he explained. As a result, “it has not been able to find the political entry points to make real progress.”

“The concept of sustainable development must therefore be incorporated into the mainstream national and international economic policy debates.”

Uniquely vulnerable states

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, in a message to the conference, said that the diverse group of countries is united by special vulnerabilities, from climate change and increased risk from disaster, to restricted markets and high conventional energy costs that can hinder development.

“Small island developing states need to free themselves from dependence on fossil fuel imports and transform their energy sectors to encompass modern efficient, clean and renewable sources of energy,” he said, noting that “sustainable development is not possible without sustainable energy”.

“Sustainable energy for all can drive economic growth. It can lift people from poverty, strengthen social equity and protect our environment,” Ban said, adding that “sustainable energy must figure prominently in the outcome” of Rio+20.

It was a theme reiterated by Michelle Gyles-McDonnough, the U.N. resident coordinator and U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) resident representative in Barbados.

“Sustainable energy for all is an idea whose time has come,” she said, adding that discussion at Rio+20 has the ability to “(give) birth to a new energy paradigm to propel the development process across SIDS and the rest of the developing world” and “achieve full realisation of the Barbados Programme of Action for SIDA”, which was the result of the 1994 conference in Barbados.

Stuart said that in reviewing how fully policies in that programme have been implemented, a “fair amount of work remains undone, especially regarding the integration of sustainability principles into mainstream economic policies”.

Stuart acknowledged that the global economic crisis and the volatility and high levels of international oil prices over the last three years have “seriously weakened the three pillars of sustainable development – the society, the economy and the environment”.

But he countered these disadvantages by noting that “at the same time, advances in technologies for harnessing renewable energy, and the capacity to increase energy intensities, have made it possible for us to believe that there can be a future for the world beyond the use of fossil fuels”.

On Friday, a panel discussion in Washington called on the U.S. government to stop treating the question of Tibetan human and civil rights violations as a moral issue.

Instead, they urged the government to focus on Tibet as a strategic issue, and one of central importance to the United States.

“Tibet has been turned into a moral issue and been pushed to the sidelines,” said Brahma Chellaney, an analyst at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. “We need to take it back to centre stage and recognise that Tibet is tied to Asian and international security.”

“We can’t make progress if we treat Tibet as a moral rather than a strategic issue,” agreed Michael J. Green, an adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here in Washington.

The remarks came during a panel discussion on Capitol Hill organised by the Foreign Policy Initiative, a neoconservative think tank.

According to Green, the administration of President Barack Obama sees Tibet only through a moral lens, and thus is prone to making decisions in deference to the bilateral relationship with China.

He noted his disappointment in President Obama’s public decision, in 2009, to delay meeting with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, and suggested that the decision had long-term implications for how other governments felt about dealing with Chinese anger over Tibet-related issues.

“When asked to meet with the Dalai Lama, the three previous U.S. presidents agreed to do so – that was the right direction,” Green said. “After Obama’s decision, however, the European Union countries started to get ‘picked apart’ by China.”

Green pointed to the examples of Denmark, France and Australia, where Chinese diplomatic bullying in the aftermath of President Obama’s decision succeeded in getting those governments to make various concessions to Beijing on meeting with the Dalai Lama.

“I strongly suspect that the U.S. decision had a ripple effect,” Green said.

Lodi Gyari, the Dalai Lama’s special envoy and a long-time mediator between the Chinese and the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, warned governments not to “shy away from discussing Tibet”.

“We need to see more visible engagement by world leaders,” he said.

In the past, Gyari noted, “there has been a lot of people expressing their sympathy” for the Tibet cause. “But Tibet has rarely been seen as relevant for those in Washington.”

With both India and China playing such central roles in current U.S. foreign policy, the panellists each pointed out that Tibet constitutes a natural – and critical – component of both trilateral and bilateral talks between those three countries.

“For India and the U.S., no issue constitutes more shared interest than Tibet,” Lalit Mansingh, an ambassador and former foreign secretary of India, said at the panel discussion. “Tibet must be acknowledged as an area for discussion in any India-U.S. talks.”

According to analysis put forth by the panellists, the centrality of Tibet in security-related discussions could grow substantially under certain contingencies.

“We can’t rule out that Tibet will be the next Asian battlefield,” Mansingh warned. “There is a growing sense that relations between India and China are not getting better.”

For the Indian government, Mansingh said, of the seven most pressing issues of concern between India and China, five are in Tibet.

“First and foremost are territorial disputes,” he said. “Currently, there are 4,000-plus kilometres of unsettled border issues, on which there are no solutions in sight. These negotiations have been going on for 60 years and are currently going nowhere. That’s worrying.”

According to Chellaney, such tensions could be exacerbated by what some suggest is increasing belligerency on the part of the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In the future, he suggests, the military could be calling more of the shots.

“PLA generals have been increasingly public about their own role,” Chellaney said, pointing to a recent series of articles in the press written by serving army officers “calling for discipline” on the part of the ruling Communist Party of China “and alluding to the military’s role in ensuring that discipline”.

Activists and scholars have expressed guarded enthusiasm at the prospect of any greater U.S. strategic engagement on the Tibet issue. But they caution that a balance would need to be struck between a focus on strategic and human rights priorities.

“The promotion of human rights must be an essential component of all U.S. diplomatic relations with China,” Kate Woznow, deputy director of Students for a Free Tibet, told IPS. “Indeed, the Chen Guangcheng case has elevated human rights to the centre of strategic and economic discussions.”

Likewise, notes Mary Beth Markey, president of the International Campaign for Tibet, “As this week shows, human rights have a prominent place in the U.S.-Chinese relationship. We don’t see a trade-off between human rights and economic and security issues – they are intertwined.”

If there are strategic issues at play for the U.S., many stem from the human rights issue, Woznow says. “If we can’t trust China on these basic issues – of rule of law, of guaranteeing the rights of the individual – how can we trust them to deal with larger international agreements?”

Students for a Free Tibet would urge the U.S. administration to bring together complementary issues of human rights and strategic concern.

“We would like to see the Obama administration take this opportunity to say to Beijing, ‘Until you address the Tibet situation, it will continue to be an impediment to our overall relationship – political and economic,” Woznow says.

Still, many see little hope of any broad change in U.S. policy in the immediate future. “The reality is also that Tibet is not of strategic importance to the U.S.,” says Thierry Dodin, the director of TibetInfoNet.

“And at the end of the day, we haven’t seen the U.S. engage significantly in anything that has no strategic meaning for them. I don’t see that changing for the time being.”

A United Nations special envoy on Friday called on the U.S. government to step up efforts to address historical injustices that continue to affect the country’s indigenous population.

S. James Anaya, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people. Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

James Anaya, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, warned that historical wrongs, particularly the loss of land, continue to have an overriding impact on the wellbeing of Native American communities.

Anaya has just finished a 12-day research mission probing the current status and experience of the U.S.’s roughly 5.2 million-strong Native American population.

The trip marked the first time that the U.N. has waded into the contentious issue of U.S. treatment of its indigenous communities, one of the poorest and most marginalised populations in the United States.

The unemployment rate for American Indians has typically been double that of the white population. On reservations – self-governed tracts of land given to Native American communities by the U.S. government – Anaya reported a 70 percent unemployment rate.

Native Americans have also long suffered from disproportionately low statistics in health and education, as well.

But Anaya pointed to an underlying sense of disaffection, as well.

“The sense of loss, alienation and indignity is pervasive throughout (Native American communities),” Anaya stated at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

“It is evident that there have still not been adequate measures of reconciliation to overcome the persistent legacies of the history of oppression, and that there is still much healing that needs to be done.”

Previously, the United States has made clear that it sees such issues as constituting internal affairs. Although Anaya was allowed to complete his research mission, he reported a lingering sense of disconnect with parts of the government.

“I regret that my efforts to meet with members of the U.S. Congress were unsuccessful,” he stated, “especially given the prominent role of Congress in defining the status and rights of indigenous peoples within the United States.”

Such engagement was only made possible in the first place due to a sudden U-turn in U.S. policy announced by President Barack Obama in 2010. At that time, the U.S. formally backed the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

The U.S. was the last country to sign on to the Declaration, which was passed in 2007. The administration of George W. Bush had twice opposed U.S. involvement, including over worries that it would give rise to new legal claims for redress.

Anaya’s trip was aimed at checking into how U.S. commitments towards the UNDRIP have been carried out thus far. He will now be compiling his research into a full report, which is expected to be presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council in September.

If his initial observations are anything to go by, however, the report’s ultimate recommendations to the U.S. government will be based largely on trying to break the negative cycle started by historical wrongs – wrongs that Anaya suggests are directly responsible for the generally dismal condition of Native American communities today.

“Over the past 12 days, I have heard stories that make evident the profound hurt that indigenous peoples continue to feel because of the history of oppression they have faced,” he said in Washington.

Perhaps most critically, that history – “all grounded in racial discrimination” – includes the significant dispossession of lands, including lands that were officially and legally given over to Native American tribes.

As such, several of Anaya’s most significant recommendations will revolve around self-governance and land issues. This includes “some form of land restoration”, the transference of “lost lands” back into Native American hands.

“Securing the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands is of central importance to indigenous peoples’ socio-economic development, self-determination and cultural integrity,” Anaya noted.

“During my visit, I heard almost universal calls from indigenous nations that the government respect tribal sovereignty, that indigenous peoples’ ability to control their own affairs be strengthened, and that the many existing barriers to the effective exercise of self-determination be removed.”

That contention is backed up by the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), a pan-tribal association founded in 1944. In a policy paper released in late April, the NCAI stated that land and sovereignty issues are “underlying the state of Native peoples in America today”.

The paper warned that the U.S. government continues to introduce laws “that prohibit tribal communities and tribal members from free use of their land and natural resources”. As recently as Apr. 19, 2012, the paper noted, U.S. officials have cited 1930s legislation “as its authority to regulate Indian land as ‘public land’ without consideration for the unique status of sovereign land.”

For some observers, such a focus on current events – and their future ramifications – makes more sense than dredging up the distant past.

Sher Malik, president of the Indigenous Peoples Survival Foundation, spoke with IPS while preparing to leave for the upcoming seventh session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, starting May 7 in New York.

“We must approach these issues with balance, not focusing on revenge,” Malik says. “Unfortunately, we do not seem to learn from our history. So while I’m against what happened 200 years ago, today I’m not going to dig up negativity for a new generation.”

Yet for Anaya, the issue of negativity goes to the heart of the ongoing marginalisation of the U.S.’s indigenous communities today. Native Americans feel “a systemic lack of respect” and discrimination from the U.S. public and media, he said.

“The broad view in American society seems to be that Native Americans are either gone or, as a group, have become insignificant – and those are simply flat wrong perceptions.”

Citing growing violence and polarisation along sectarian lines, human rights groups and independent experts here are urging Washington to exert more pressure on the government of Bahrain to free political prisoners and launch a serious dialogue with its opposition on major democratic reforms.

While the administration of President Barack Obama has repeatedly called on the al-Khalifa monarchy to follow through on recommendations made by an international commission last November, it has been reluctant to take stronger steps for fear of alienating Saudi Arabia, Bahrain’s much larger neighbour, according to analysts here.

The Pentagon also does not want to jeopardise its use of the island as the headquarters for its Fifth Fleet, particularly given its strategic location directly across the Gulf from Iran.

The administration “should be telling the Bahraini government that time is short, and, if they don’t act, there will be an escalation on the U.S. side,” said Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), who was briefly detained by police at a demonstration during a visit to the Gulf kingdom last month.

In addition to maintaining a de facto suspension on arms sales to Bahrain, he called for Washington to consider supporting a resolution on the situation at the U.N. Human Rights Council and denying visas to senior officials deemed responsible for abuses committed during the past year’s crackdown against the predominantly Shi’a opposition.

Speaking at a forum sponsored by the Washington-based Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) Thurday, Malinowski also urged Washington to signal its willingness to consider moving the Fifth Fleet out of Bahrain. “The military base is not sustainable as violence grows,” he said.

Malinowski’s advice fell short of that of some Gulf specialists here, notably a former top Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst for Near Eastern and South Asia. Writing in the Financial Times just after the controversial running of the Formula One race in Bahrain last month, Emile Nakhleh urged the administration to begin pulling the fleet out now.

“The huge U.S. naval presence in Bahrain has not improved western security in the Gulf; has not altered Iran’s behaviour; and, more important, has not silenced the anti-regime opposition in the Gulf and in other Arab countries,” wrote Nakhleh, who also headed the CIA’s Political Islam desk.

“Instead, its presence has arguably increased Iran’s belligerence and given Sunni regimes, including Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the false impression that Washington has given them a licence to kill their own people,” he added, noting that such a move would signal all regimes in the region that “Arab dictatorship will no longer be tolerated whether in Bahrain, Syria, Saudi Arabia, or elsewhere.”

The appeals for a stronger U.S. stance reflect growing concerns here that hardliners led by the world’s longest-serving prime minister, Khalifah ibn Sulman al-Khalifa, have solidified their hold on power and successfully marginalised reformist elements identified with the crown prince, Salman bin Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa.

The administration had hoped to bolster the crown prince’s position in the immediate aftermath of the last year’s Saudi-backed crackdown against the opposition by, among other things, arranging a high- profile White House meeting with Obama last June.

They had also hoped that he and King Hamad, considered a “moderate” by the administration, could force through implementation of the key recommendations made in November by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI), which was tasked to investigate abuses committed during crackdown.

In addition to the use of excessive force by security forces, resulting in several dozen deaths, the BICI’s nearly 500-page report detailed other serious abuses, including the rounding up, detention, torture and mistreatment of hundreds of demonstrators, the wrongful dismissal of thousands of others from government posts and universities, and serious due-process violations, including the admission of forced confessions, committed against defendants brought before special security courts.

The BICI’s key recommendations included the release of all political prisoners, investigation and prosecution of senior officials suspected of giving orders to carry out abuses, and launching a serious dialogue with the opposition, which has been led by the al- Wefaq party, leading to democratic reforms that would give the Shi’a community, which is believed to comprise between 60 and 70 percent of Bahraini citizens, a much bigger voice in the government.

While some technical suggestions, such as the installation of cameras in jails to discourage torture (although Malinowski noted that police now commit abuses against detainees in the streets and back alleys) have been implemented, the government has done little or nothing on the more overarching recommendations designed to further reconciliation and prevent radicalisation.

“The crown prince has been marginalised,” according to Joost Hiltermann, a Gulf expert at the International Crisis Group (ICG).

He also noted that the government appears intent on increasing its dependence on Saudi Arabia – hundreds of whose troops remain in Bahrain after they were sent there to back up Bahraini forces during the crackdon – to the extent of favouring a “Saudi-Bahraini confederation” that, if consummated, would mean “political suicide by Saudi embrace”.

Like Malinowski, Hiltermann said the situation on the ground is deteriorating as more radical anti-monarchical elements in the Shi’a community, notably the February 14 Youth Movement, in support at Al- Wefaq’s expense.

The recent use of molotov cocktails by some opposition elements against the police, as well as the police’s increased use of tear gas and birdshot, represents a “disturbing trend” that underlines the urgent need for implementation of BICI’s recommendations, he said.

“The value out of the BICI is zero on the ground,” according to Khalil Al-Marzooq, an Al-Wefaq leader and former parliamentarian, who also participated in the POMED forum and appealed for a stronger response by the U.S. and the international community, which, he complained, has taken a “wait and see” attitude.

“The cycle of violence is growing; …the hope is still there, but we have to act fast because time is against us.”

In that respect, many analysts are focused on the fate of Abdul Hadi al-Khawaja, a dual Danish-Bahraini citizen and long-time human rights activist who was sentenced by a military court with 20 other activists last year to life imprisonment on charges that they plotted to overthrow the government.

Al-Khawaja, who has been on a hunger strike for 88 days and, according to some reports, is reportedly being forced-fed in an army hospital, and is co-defendants are considered “prisoners of conscience” by Amnesty International. Earlier this week, Bahrain’s Court of Cassation accepted an appeal of their case but declined to release them on bail.

“The most important step in turning down the temperature in Bahrain at this point is if Al-Khawaja were released, even as a preliminary move, with an indication that other political prisoners will be released,” according to Toby Jones, a Gulf expert at Rutgers University.

“Things are very, very bad and will only get worse unless there’s a breakthrough,” he told IPS. “Letting Al- Khawaja go would be seen as an important gesture, and it would save his life.”

The administration has also pushed hard both privately and publicly for precisely that, calling earlier this week for Manama “to urgently consider all available options to resolve his case humanely and expeditiously.”

“Many political activists remain in prison, some of them arrested for participation in non-violent demonstrations, and we encourage the speedy resolution of all of these cases, as recommended by the BICI report,” a State Department spokeperson told IPS. “We further urge the government of Bahrain to drop charges against all individuals who engaged in free speech and peaceable assembly.”

But whether the government is listening to Washington remains to be seen.

In another action this week, Bahraini authorities reversed a previous decision to grant visas to representatives of several U.S. and international mainstream organisations – including the Committee to Protect Journalists, Freedom House, Index on Censorship, and Reporters Without Borders – to travel to the kingdom next week to assess press and free-speech conditions there.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

A civil disobedience campaign last August led to hundreds of arrests. Credit: Kanya D'Almeida/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 4 2012 (IPS)

What are you doing on Saturday? Peter Nix, a retiree, will be standing on a railway track on Canada’s west coast blocking a coal train destined to ship U.S. and Canadian coal to Asia.

Nix will be joined by dozens of people near White Rock, British Columbia on May 5. They will be in good company as tens of thousands of people around the world participate in global day of action to “connect the dots” between climate change and extreme weather.

“There will be at least 1,200 actions in more than 100 countries,” says Jamie Henn, communications director for 350.org, a U.S.-based environmental group.

There’s been a general perception that climate change is a future problem but with all the extreme weather disasters and weather records the public is being to realise that climate change is here, says Henn.

“Recent opinion surveys show the more than 60 percent of the U.S. public are connecting extreme weather to climate change,” Henn told IPS.

The U.S. public is not wrong, say scientists.

“All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be,” Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, told IPS previously.

Last year the U.S. endured 14 separate billion-dollar-plus weather disasters including flooding, hurricanes and tornados.

This year, most of the U.S. and Canada experienced summer in winter with record-shattering heat waves in March. More than 15,000 temperature records were broken in the U.S. which had its first billion-dollar weather disaster of the year. In most places, the spring month of April was colder than March.

“What kind of future are we leaving for our children if we keep putting more carbon into the atmosphere?” asks Nix.

As a former scientist who used to work for the oil industry in Canada’s tar sands, he has a pretty good idea of what’s coming unless fossil fuels are phased out. Catastrophic consequences including everything from droughts, floods, forest fires, food shortages, to increases in tropical diseases and political chaos.

“Politicians are not leading. Corporations are only interested in quick profits. They are the real radicals in our society,” says Nix. This is a reference to a high-level Canadian official who accused environmentalists of having a “radical ideological agenda” in an open letter.

“There is no one left to protect the future for our children but the public,” says Nix.

Every day, six long trains each carrying up to 10,000 tonnes of coal from the U.S. and British Columbia (BC) travel the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) rail line to the Westshore Coal Terminal at Delta, BC just north of the U.S. border. It is the busiest coal export port in North America.

The climate-heating carbon in the coal exported every year is equivalent to the annual emissions for the entire province of BC of 4.5 million people and many energy-intense industries like aluminium smelting and mining, says Nix.

“We have to stop burning coal. Leading scientists like James Hansen have made that clear,” he said.

Nix and other members of British Columbians for Climate Action have asked to meet with government officials to work out a plan to phase out coal exports. Their requests have been ignored. Now they have asked U.S. billionaire Warren Buffet to take action. His company Berkshire Hathaway Inc owns BNSF, one of the largest freight networks in North America.

Buffet has previously cancelled plans to build new coal-fired plants in the U.S. In a letter to Buffet, British Columbians for Climate Action write, “…when it comes to climate change it appears that other people are doing all the suffering while you profit from the very causes of the problem.”

On Saturday, 23-year-old Brandon Cormier wants to inform her local residents in the small Canadian town of Orangeville, Ontario about one of the sources of the climate change problem, Canada’s huge tar sands operation that boils oil out sands under its northern forests.

Cormier is organising a demo-fest event as part of International Stop the Tar Sands Day*, which is also May 5.

“I am hoping to make local people more aware of climate change, and that the tar sands are a big contributor,” says Cormier, who has never done anything like this.

International Stop the Tar Sands Day has been held annually since 2010 with events in 50 cities around the world last year. It involves playful demonstration-festivals involving music, dancing, costumes, handing out flowers and postcards as part of an awareness-raising effort.

The tar sands operations in the province of Alberta supply the US with more than 2.4 million barrels of heavy oil a day. Considered “dirty oil” because requires large amounts of natural gas and clean water to extract it from the ground, it is under growing international pressure as a major source of carbon emissions and over destruction of thousands of kilometres of forests and wetlands.

“Not many people I know want to help me with this. They think that it is silly being so far away (from Alberta)….But I won’t let that discourage me. It’s everyone’s planet.”

Cormier she says even if just one more person goes home on Saturday to research the impacts of the tar sands and spreads the word, it will have been a success. “I am happy that I am able to make a difference even if it is small.”

*Full disclosure: International Stop the Tar Sands Day was started by Leahy’s son Derek Leahy, who remains the European coordinator.

Pakistan and Afghanistan have begun a joint immunisation campaign against polio, while a new project aims to promote child immunisation in Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 3 2012 (IPS)

In northern Pakistan, one in ten children dies before the age of five from diseases such as polio, measles or hepatitis, despite the availability of vaccines. And while health workers feared visiting this region, which includes the mountainous Swat district controlled by the Taliban until 2009, local people also fear the potentially life-saving vaccines.

“Some local imams (religious leaders) have been preaching that vaccines are an attempt by the U.S. government to sterilise children,” said Erfaan Hussein Babak, director of The Awakening project, which aims to promote vaccinations in the Swat district.

“The child mortality rate from preventable diseases is distressingly high,” Babak told IPS by phone from the region.

Some people in the region understand that vaccines are safe, but overall, there is little demand by parents for vaccinations, he said. To counter certain negative perceptions, The Awakening project is working to promote child vaccination by establishing village health committees, school clubs and radio programs.

The project is being funded by the Canada-based Sandra Rotman Centre as one of five projects awarded 10,000 U.S. dollars to educate populations in developing countries about the use of vaccines and immunisation to prevent diseases.

Combating myth

By 2004, polio had nearly been eradicated in Pakistan. However, the disease has seen a resurgence in the northern areas, in part due to the mistaken belief that the oral vaccine could render children impotent or sterile.

Now, suspected polio victims are found even in large cities, including Islamabad. Last month, the Pakistan government launched a major vaccination effort to vaccinate 34 million children.

“We will talk to people on the basis of passages in the Holy Quran, in which it is clearly stated that He has provided the medicines for every illness,” said Babak. “We are also engaging with the imams to convey accurate information and to connect medicine and health promotion with proper care of children.”

1.7 million children die every year from a vaccine-preventable disease, which amounts to one life every 20 seconds, according to Peter Singer, director of the Sandra Rotman Centre.

Vaccine-preventable diseases remain prevalent in the developing world. They cause or contribute to 20 to 35 percent of all deaths of children under the age of five while stunting the mental and physical development of countless others.

“For the first time in history, we have or will soon have vaccines to control many deadly diseases and improve the quality of life of every child on the planet,” Singer said.

“Paradoxically, the challenge now is to stimulate public demand for vaccinations.”

In order to meet this challenge, health experts and officials from the developing world were invited to submit their ideas in a competition. Five winning projects out of 60 were selected by the Rotman Centre.

From Uganda to El Salvador

The winning project in Uganda invites young people to local cafés to learn about deadly cervical cancer and how the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine can prevent it. What is unique about this project, Science Café Uganda, is it brings experts to informal meetings in a country where a large portion of the population is illiterate.

“There are lots of myths about the HPV vaccine among those aware of it; most people don’t know it exists. People don’t have information and that poses serious danger to women’s health,” said Christine Munduru, a public health worker and volunteer leader of the project.

The project With Love We Learn is mobilising Salvadorean civil society to educate and lobby female parliamentarians so the national government will include HPV in its National Plan of Immunisation.

Vaccinating 80 percent of 13-year-old girls would reduce cervical cancer rates by 70 percent, said Lisseth Ruiz de Campos of Asaprecan, the El Salvador Cancer Prevention Association.

In South Africa, the Future Fighters project will encourage and mentor students at the schools to create their own groups of HIV education ambassadors. HIV victims are still shunned and suffer other social stigma in South Africa.

In Egypt, a group of young doctors and hundreds of volunteers hope to educate parents at hospitals and nurseries about preventing pneumonia in children by using a simple competition involving children’s coloring books as the prize.

Child pneumonia kills, on average, 42,000 children in Egypt every year, according to Mohamed Zaazoue, project director of the Protect Your Children project.

Parents get a quick lesson on the disease and its prevention, pass a simple quiz and win the prize of crayons and coloring books about pneumonia for their children.

“The truth is, everybody wins,” said Zaazoue in a release.

As governments around the world continue to discuss how to ease sanctions in Myanmar, fears are increasing that a sudden massive influx of foreign investment could be detrimental to the delicate ongoing transition.

“I see a rush of over-investment, to the extent that things that can be done to slow down investment may be in the long-term interest of the country,” Lex Rieffel, an economist and Southeast Asia expert with the Brookings Institution, said Thursday at the Council on Foreign Relations, in Washington.

“I can assure you that even if we keep sanctions in place, there is going to be plenty of investment in this country. But what we will probably see is underinvestment in people – the government is currently meeting with every Tom, Dick and Harry, but there is no time being set aside for important decision-making or implementation.”

Recent weeks have seen a flurry of investment-related moves surrounding Myanmar, kicked off by two critical events on Apr. 1. First were parliamentary by-elections in which opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won 43 seats. That included one for Suu Kyi, who finally made her first formal entrance into the government on Tuesday.

Several major governments, including those of the U.S. and U.K., used the electoral outcome to begin to draw down the economic sanctions that have been in place for years. These had successfully cut Myanmar off from much of the rest of the world, making much foreign investment exceedingly difficult if not impossible.

Second and simultaneous with the election, the Myanmar government took long-overdue steps to allow its currency, the kyat, to trade freely.

For three-plus decades, government officials had kept the kyat pegged to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) global rate. While this left the country’s official exchange rate at between six and eight kyat to the U.S. dollar, black market rates hovered between 700 and 1400 kyat to the dollar.

Such a discrepancy created a huge impediment to doing business aboveboard.

“The currency decision was a more important step than the by- election,” Rieffel says, “in terms of its potential to affect the lives of ordinary people of Myanmar.”

Even prior to the elections, over the past year foreign business representatives had begun flocking to Myanmar, as the country implemented a series of contested but significant reforms. Reports suggest that inbound flights and high-end hotel rooms in Yangon have been abnormally full, particularly with potential investors.

Already, competition has heated up. According to a letter by the U.S. business community sent to President Barack Obama last week, “U.S. companies are starting from a disadvantage, as numerous entities from Europe and elsewhere in Asia have substantially stepped up their engagement in recent months.”

The letter, signed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council and others, including the American Petroleum Institute, called for “lifting the financial services facilitation and transactions sanctions in conjunction with easing the investment ban”.

The sanctions issue has been a divisive one for Myanmar watchers for years, and the overall efficacy of the multiple international sanctions regimes remains debated today. With most agreeing that the time has come to revisit the various financial and other bans in place, however, the conversation has shifted to the rate at which these measures should be rolled back.

“We do not agree with the business community’s approach,” Jennifer Quigley, with the U.S. Campaign for Burma, told IPS. “They think they should be allowed into all sectors, with no restrictions. The argument seems to be, ‘Everyone else is being let in, so we don’t want to be left out.’ But it’s too early for U.S. companies to go in.”

In an economy as devastated as that of Myanmar, the country’s complete lack of regulation spooks many as international investors begin to line up. The U.S. Campaign for Burma and many others are currently pushing for the adoption of a framework by the U.S. and other major international actors on how to encourage investment that positively impacts on the people of Burma.

Critical among these are ensuring buy-in by local communities, particularly long-marginalised ethnic communities. Given that much of Burma’s natural resources are found in areas dominated by ethnic minorities, Quigley says, “Ethnic groups feel that the regime is engaging in talks for economic benefit – so, right now, ceasefire negotiations are very fragile.”

Other reforms notwithstanding, violent conflicts are continuing between ethnic minority groups and the government, as are related human rights violations.

The sanctions issue also remains one of the most important points of leverage for the international community – simultaneously its greatest stick and carrot.

“If we go in and allow foreign investment, there won’t be any motivation for the government towards political resolution,” Quigley says.

Others see economics as having come dangerously close to eclipsing more pressing concerns.

“The United States needs to be very stingy about removing sanctions, as once sanctions are removed the Burmese military government (now in civilian clothes) is likely to dump Aung San Suu Kyi, the NLD and the pro-democracy forces,” Kyi May Kaung, an analyst based in Washington, told IPS.

“The U.S. has to be very careful that it does not place human rights on the back burner, as it seems to be doing in the case of Chen Guangcheng in Beijing.”

The United States should double aid to Central America and focus it more on programmes designed to strengthen the region’s criminal justice institutions to help curb the skyrocketing violence in the region, according to a new report published by an influential foreign policy group.

That would mean increasing the approximately 300 million dollars currently provided annually under the State Department’s Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) and other U.S. government agencies to 600 million dollars.

It would place much greater emphasis on such measures as law enforcement training, protection programmes for witnesses, prosecutors, and judges, and reform of the region’s overcrowded prisons, according to “Countering Criminal Violence in Central America” released by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

“Support for reducing violence in Central America should be the top U.S. priority for the region, because it poses a real threat to the rule of law and governance, which is already very weak,” declared Michael Shifter, the report’s author.

“Our interests in promoting trade and investment and in fighting drug trafficking are very hard to pursue effectively without bringing down the levels of violence in the region,” Shifter, who also heads the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), told IPS.

The U.S. can also do more at home to reduce the mayhem in Central America, according to the 43-page report.

That includes more vigorous efforts to reduce demand for illicit drugs here, exerting tighter control over the export of dangerous weapons at both the federal and state levels, and sharing more information with the region’s governments about the thousands of convicted criminals deported by the U.S. to their jurisdictions each year.

In addition, Washington should grant Temporary Protective Status (TPS) to undocumented Guatemalan migrants in the U.S. and extend TPS for Salvadorans and Hondurans here beyond 2013. That would enable tens of thousands of Central Americans to continue working here, thus providing relief to governments struggling to cope with natural disasters and insecurity, according to the report.

The 43-page report comes amidst growing alarm over skyrocketing homicide rates in the region, particularly in the “northern triangle” of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. At more than 82 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, Honduras is believed to have had the world’s highest homicide rate in 2010, while El Salvador, at 66 homicides per 100,000 – more than three times Mexico’s rate – was not far behind.

In addition to the human loss and trauma it inflicts on these societies, the violence has takes a heavy economic toll.

“The direct costs of crime exceeds nine percent of GDP in several Central American countries,” noted Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs Jose Fernandez, who told a CFR forum this week that the administration of President Barack Obama hoped to increase aid to CARSI, in particular, in 2013.

Much of the violence has been blamed on gangs, the most prominent of which, Mara Salvatruchas (MS-13) and 18th Street Gang (M-18), originated in immigrant communities in the U.S.

Gang members who were deported en masse by U.S. immigration authorities found a region still struggling to emerge from bloody civil wars with a “large pool of demobilised and unemployed men with easy access to weapons”, according to the report.

More recently, the entrance of Mexican cartels, particularly the Zetas, to secure their control over key drug trafficking routes between South and North America, increased already-high levels of violence in the region.

Given the U.S. role in the Central American wars of the 1980s, the presence here of an estimated three million people from the region, and its own indirect contributions to the violence through its demand for illicit drugs, its deportation policies, and its lax gun-control laws, the U.S., according to the report, bears a “special responsibility” to help Central America deal with the crisis.

Colombia, whose ties to the U.S. aren’t nearly as deep, received well over seven billion dollars from Washington under “Plan Colombia” between 2000 and 2011.

Washington currently provides about 300 million dollars a year in total bilateral aid to Central America, about one third of which is provided through the Pentagon.

With the rise in violence, the region’s governments, particularly those in the northern triangle, are turning to the military for help, according to Shifter. He noted that Guatemala’s new president, Gen. Otto Perez Molina (ret.), is particularly eager despite a 33-year-old ban on direct U.S. aid to Guatemala’s army.

“As things get worse, the pressure will grow to increase military aid,” Shifter said.

But the administration should resist that pressure, he said, a view strongly echoed by Adriana Beltran, a Central America specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), who said the report was “right on target in emphasising the need for a balanced approach to the problem …and not on beefing up the region’s military forces.”

To the extent military assistance is deemed necessary, the report said, “It should be granted only under the strictest conditions.”

In Guatemala’s case, any consideration of overturning the military aid ban should be conditioned on the government’s full cooperation with the U.N.-created International Commission Against Impunity (CICIG), justice for serious abuses committed during the civil war, judicial reform, and support for the public prosecutor’s office, according to the report. It also suggests that the CICIG model could be usefully applied to Honduras and El Salvador as well.

Other recommendations in the report include scaling up local crime prevention initiatives across the region and sharing best practices between regional governments and Colombia and Mexico.

“The principal lesson” learned from Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative in Mexico, according to the report, is that it is “wiser to direct scarce resources toward serious institutional reform” than to spend more money on drug interdiction efforts that have generally failed to fundamentally affect the supply of drugs.

In addition to professionalising the police and other criminal justice institutions, reform should also include measures to make the judicial system both more accessible and more efficient.

Washington should also provide more incentives for national governments to implement tax reforms that would generate more revenue to fight criminal violence and corruption, as well as provide basic social services. Average tax revenues in the region currently represent only about 17 percent of GDP, lower than the average, a lower burden than in Sub-Saharan Africa.

“We have states that don’t have resources and private sectors that are not willing,” Carlos Dada, the founder of El Salvador’s El Faro news website, noted in a discussion of the report here last week.

David Holiday, a veteran Central America expert at the Open Society Policy Center here, praised the report’s emphasis on institutional reform in dealing with violence but questioned whether key institutions were themselves “amenable”.

He noted, for example, that the Salvadorean police has “effectively gutted its inspector-general’s office” and that a number of officers who it was investigating have since been promoted.

“The problem is that, as always, the U.S. has more important interests – business, migration, drugs-– with these governments,” he said. “El Salvador is our closest partner in the region, but when something important like police accountability goes awry there, it’s not clear that we do anything much about it.”

But Shifter insisted that was not a reason for withholding assistance.

“That’s what everyone said about Colombia, but more Colombians enjoy security than 12 years ago, and I think the U.S. contributed to that,” he told IPS.

“I agree that the U.S. has to push harder to make sure that police are professional and respect human rights. The whole point of this report is that institution building should be a higher priority. The objective is not to turn Central America into Sweden; it’s to get the violence under control.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

It’s a deal that’s been more than 15 years in the making and the unmaking. The United States and Japan have been struggling since the 1990s to transform the U.S. military presence on the island of Okinawa, the southernmost prefecture of Japan.

In preparation for this week’s visit of Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda to Washington, the two sides rolled out the latest attempt to resolve what has grown into a major sticking point in alliance relations.

According to the most recent deal, 9,000 U.S. Marines will leave Okinawa, thus fulfilling a longstanding U.S. promise to reduce the overall military footprint on the island. Half of that number will go to expanded facilities on Guam while the remainder will rotate through other bases in the region, including Australia, the Philippines, and Hawaii.

Japan will cover a little more than three billion dollars out of the estimated 8.6-billion-dollar cost of the Guam transfer.

“These adjustments are necessary to realize a U.S. force posture in the Asia-Pacific region that is more geographically distributed, operationally resilient, and politically sustainable,” according to a joint statement issued by Washington and Tokyo.

The deal confirms an earlier decision to separate two key components of the Pacific realignment, namely the transfer of some Marines away from Okinawa and the construction of a replacement facility to house the Marines that remain behind.

The current location of the Marines, the Futenma air base in Ginowan City, is both outdated and, because of the city’s growth over the years, increasingly hazardous for the surrounding civilian population.

“The decision to decouple finding a Futenma replacement from the move of Marines to Guam and elsewhere has relieved some of the pent-up pressure in the U.S.-Japan alliance,” observes Patrick Cronin, senior director of the Asia-Pacific Security Programme at the Center for a New American Security.

“Building a second runway at Camp Schwab is still unlikely to happen anytime soon, if ever, but the alliance can now move forward with more closely integrating U.S. and Japan Self-Defense Forces.”

Steve Clemons, long-time Japan observer and editor-at-large at The Atlantic, characterises the agreement as a case of the Japanese no. “They say, ‘it is very difficult,’ but they don’t actually say no,” he says. “This agreement allows the Japanese no to happen without Japan explicitly saying no to its strategic partner.”

The transfer of the Marines has considerable support on Okinawa and Japan more generally. It has, however, generated concerns in the U.S. Congress, particularly over costs. At the end of 2011, Congress removed all the funding connected to the Guam transfer in the 2012 military spending bill, pending completion of an independent review.

Key critics of the process of Pacific realignment – including John McCain, Carl Levin and Jim Webb – remain sceptical of the latest agreement since the review has not yet been completed.

Also sceptical are anti-base activists in the places where the Marine presence will increase.

“Hawaii does not need more military,” says Koohan Paik, a media professor at Kauai Community College.

“There are already 161 military installations in Hawaii, which have resulted in hundreds of sites contaminated with PCBs, trichloroethylene, jet fuel and diesel, mercury, lead, radioactive Cobalt 60, unexploded ordnance, perchlorate, and depleted uranium. And they call this security? The only ‘security’ this brings is economic security to military contractors.”

The second part of the deal, the construction of a replacement facility for Futenma, remains as challenging as before. Okinawans have consistently opposed the construction of a new facility on the island. Although only one percent of Japan’s total landmass, Okinawa already houses nearly 75 percent of the entire U.S. base presence.

Polls indicate that at least 80 percent of Okinawans oppose relocating the facility on their island. In Henoko, where the government in Tokyo has proposed to expand the existing Camp Schwab to accommodate the Marines from Futenma, activists have maintained a sit-in protest since 1996. They have argued that the new construction would, among other things, compromise an already endangered species of dugong, a large sea mammal.

Okinawans have not been enthusiastic about any of the other options that would keep the Marines on the island, including the expansion of the existing Air Force base at Kadena. According to Clemons, the Kadena option also runs up against inter-service rivalry, with the Marines and the Air Force unwilling to make the necessary compromises to share the space.

“We’re going to have a low-yield ulcer that will continue indefinitely,” observes Clemons. “We’ll burn through another 10 years with Henoko not built until finally a future presidential administration will pull the plug.”

The latest U.S.-Japan deal comes at a time of considerable uncertainty regarding military spending. The Pentagon is under pressure to reduce costs in order to meet new spending limits dictated by concerns over rising national debt.

However, the Barack Obama administration’s “Pacific pivot”, announced last year, is difficult to achieve on the cheap. U.S. allies are concerned that they will have to shoulder an increasing amount of the costs of this realignment. Included in this bill will be the cost of upgrading the Futenma facility while Tokyo and Washington debate the base’s future.

“There are serious and legitimate questions about the strategic underpinnings of the dispersal of U.S. forces in small numbers to disparate territories,” says Cronin. “There are also contradictory trends between trying to preserve a strong military presence in the Asia-Pacific region and the real trend lines in spending on serious naval and air forces.”

Last week, in a lecture hall at the University of Illinois Chicago, 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi took a reality many of us working in human rights know well, and drove it home with a story from her own nation, a land her government says she is no longer allowed to call home.

She reminded us that women’s rights are a gateway to democracy and to prosperity across society. She spoke about the strength of the feminist movement in Iran, a nation where more than 60 percent of college students are women, and where both men and women understand that by building women’s rights, they strike a blow against government oppression everywhere.

On Day 2 of the 12th Annual Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, at the Women Forging Peace panel, we had the honour of hearing five leaders in human rights talk about the role of women in peace-building, including Ms. Ebadi. Together they spoke about the impact women’s groups have already had on the fight for universal freedom.

Caryl Stern, president of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, told us about a meeting she held in a refugee camp in Darfur. A group of women had requested the meeting, she was told, to talk about building their camp’s first-ever childcare centre, a solution to a string of infant injuries at the camp wells where so many mothers must spend their day pumping fresh water.

The women arrived, and she readied herself to explain that, unfortunately, the recovery mission might not have the resources to provide the bricks, build a facility, and staff the daycare.

She was shocked when the women waved her concerns aside – they had already gathered the bricks for the facility. They had already worked out a staffing schedule between themselves. And they had already calculated the resources -water in particular – that each family would have to sacrifice to create this safe refuge for their children.

All that these refugee women needed from UNICEF, it turned out, was a bit of cement to lay between the bricks of a women’s centre they had already founded.

At that moment, Jody Williams, 1997 Nobel Peace Laureate, spoke about the experience of being a female Nobel Peace Laureate. She said that in more than 110 years, only 15 women have won the award, but that they were all united around a common goal, and all eager to combine one another’s successes and lessons to build a greater movement.

These Laureates, together with leaders like those joining Ms. Williams and Ms. Ebadi during the Nobel Summit panel, are spreading a message of collaboration and achievement that every young person needs to hear.

Toward the end of our session, a teenage student from the Chicago Public Schools who studied the RFK Center‘s Speak Truth to Power curriculum had the opportunity to pose a question to the panel. She asked Ms. Ebadi her advice on balancing a desire to raise a family with the drive to change the world.

And Ms. Ebadi shared an experience that, as a mother of daughters, I understood firsthand. She said that, far from being a deterrent against action, the birth of her daughter was a driving force behind her decision to keep fighting for the future of women and for the human rights of everyone around us.

And that struck me as a message that runs throughout our events in Chicago this week. Women’s rights are not separate from human rights. Refugee rights are not separate from human rights. LGBTI rights – like the ones our Human Rights Laureate from Uganda, Frank Mugisha, is in Chicago to speak about – are not separate from human rights.

All of us are here willing to do the work to build a more equal world, one that lives up to the vision my father Robert Kennedy was speaking about when he said, “The future is not a gift; it is an achievement.”

More than ever before, women and young people are part of building that future we hope to achieve, and as Day 2 of our Summit drew to a close, I was more eager than ever to hear what we all think of next.

*Today’s post is one in a series of dispatches from Kerry Kennedy during the 12th Annual World Summit of Nobel Laureates in Chicago, Illinois.

Fifteen million babies, or more than one in 10 infants, are born prematurely each year. Over one million die soon after birth, or survive to face a lifetime of health complications, says a new report by the World Health Organisation and co- sponsors.

Preterm births are rising in almost all countries and are now the single most important cause of neonatal deaths. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

Preterm births, defined by 37 weeks of completed gestation or less, are rising in almost all countries and are now the single most important cause of neonatal deaths of babies under 28 days.

“Being born too soon is an unrecognized killer. Preterm births account for almost half of all newborn deaths worldwide and are now the second leading cause of death in children under five, after pneumonia,” Joy Lawn, co-editor of the report “Born Too Soon: The Global Action Report on Preterm Birth,” and director of Global Evidence and Policy for Save the Children, said in a press release.

“The numbers of preterm births are increasing. In all but three countries, preterm birth rates increased in the last 20 years. Worldwide, 50 million births still happen at home and many babies die without birth or death certificates.”

Fifteen countries account for two-thirds of the world’s preterm births, with India and China in the lead. Out of all live births, preterm births account for 11.1 percent, 60 percent of which occur in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. On average, 12 percent of preterm births occur in low-income countries compared to nine percent in high-income countries.

“What I found shocking is (the difference) geographically and within countries when we look at the rates of preterm birth in Asia and sub- Sahara Africa… What really struck me is the equity gap of preterm birth,” Christopher Howson, co-editor of the report and head of Global Programs for March of Dimes, told IPS.

“You take a baby that is less than 28 weeks, if the baby is born in a rich country, it has a 90 percent chance to live. If born in a poor country, it only has a 10 percent chance to live.”

However, the problem is not confined to the developing world. The United States and Brazil both rank among the top countries with the highest number of preterm births. In the U.S., at sixth place, more than one in nine births, about 12 percent, are preterm.

There are disparities within groups in the U.S. too. In 2009, the preterm birth rate for white citizens was 10.9 percent, while it was as high as 17.5 percent for black citizens. The age of the mother also mattered, with the birth rate between 11 and 12 percent for women aged 20 to 35 and over 15 percent for women under 17 and over 40.

The report links a number of factors to the increase in preterm births, which in general remain unexplained though a number of risk factors have been identified such as a prior history of preterm birth, underweight, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, smoking, genetics and pregnancies spaced too closely together.

In high-income countries, causes include older women having babies, increased use of fertility drugs resulting in multi-fetal pregnancies, and medically unnecessary inductions and Cesarean deliveries before full-term.

Main causes identified in low-income countries include infections, malaria, HIV, and high adolescent pregnancy rates.

Preterm births have been a largely overlooked and neglected problem, health experts admit. This report is the first ever to provide comparable country-level estimates for preterm births.

“Ten years ago, I was working as a pediatrician in Ghana and it was very obvious every day…I was in charge of the baby nursery with about 11,000 births a year and there were babies dying every day of things that they did not need to die of. I started looking around and at the time there were no U.N. estimates of death or clinical guidelines of what to do or donors interested in it,” Lawn told IPS.

According to the report, two-thirds of premature births could be prevented with “feasible, cost-effective care.” Prevention is the key to reduce preterm numbers, and an estimated three-quarters of babies born too soon could survive if only a few proven and inexpensive treatments were more widely available.

Empowering and educating girls, family planning, screening women for known medical conditions, assuring good nutrition before and during pregnancy, and better access to healthcare are effective measures in reducing premature births.

Essential and extra newborn care, including feeding support, neonatal resuscitation, and Kangaroo mother care, a method involving infants being carried with skin-to-skin contact, could help in reducing the number of premature deaths.

The report also recommends that healthcare providers collaborate with businesses and civil societies to advocate, invest and provide funding to reduce preterm births. Even adding a dollar for each woman in prenatal care can make a difference, Lawn told IPS. “There are a couple of things that people can do to make the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) reachable. Even if the countries just picked two methods, like Kangaroo care and prenatal steroid shots, that can be a major game changer.”

MDG 5 aims to reduce by three-quarters the maternal mortality ratio, as well as achieve universal access to reproductive health care.

There’s an action gap in what is being done, Howson said. Civil society groups, for example, are an untapped resource that can be powerful in the community.

“We all have a role to play. I think in particular that groups like parent groups are so incredibly important in really creating noise. They are able to advocate from the ground up and that can be much more effective than trying to change from the top down,” he said.

*Stephanie Parker reported from United Nations headquarters in New York.

By Aline Jenckel
UNITED NATIONS, May 2 2012 (IPS)

In the weeks and months leading up to the Rio+20 summit on sustainable development, groups spanning a wide spectrum of interests are doing everything in their power to ensure that the outcomes of the summit are actually carried out.

Ivana Savic, left, and Kiara Worth, co-ordinators of the Conference on Sustainable Development Major Group for Children and Youth. Credit: Aline Jenckel/IPS

One such group is the Conference on Sustainable Development Major Group of Children and Youth, which believes that strengthening youth involvement and activism is urgent and critical to the success of the United Nations (U.N.) Conference on Sustainable Development, commonly known as Rio+20, to be held this year in Rio de Janeiro from June 20 to 22.

Ivana Savic and Kiara Worth, co-ordinators of the CSD Major Group of Children and Youth, have high hopes for the summit and the results it could bring.

“We will see a renewal of the political will, and we would like to see youth being recognised more concretely in official documentation,” Worth told IPS, although she acknowledged that while she had “huge expectations, whether or not they will be achieved is a different thing”.

“It is not only about the policy, the dialogue or the official statements,” Worth added. “It is about creating the energy and the sense of urgency and the sense of ability to move forward.”

Worth and Savic also hope to see different forums established that will inspire, enable and motivate youth to participate in negotiations.

The period from April 30 to May 4 is the third informal week of negotiations on the zero draft of the outcome document for Rio+20. The negotiations are being held at the U.N.’s New York headquarters.

U.N. Correspondent Aline Jenckel talked with the women about the work of the youth organisation and their hopes for the Rio+20 summit as well as preceding negotiations.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What are the main concerns of the CSD Major Group for Children and Youth? A: (Savic) What needs to be done during these negotiations (held at the U.N. this week), and I believe also for the Rio + 20 Summit, are adopting a human rights based approach to sustainable development and strengthening human rights in the outcome document.

(Worth) Within the themes of Rio+20, there are different policy points for which we are strongly advocating. Within the green economy, for example, we are promoting sustainable agriculture. The main line in the green economy is also youth employment, in terms of shifting from job seeking to job creation.

In addition, we advocate for more reflection on creating a blue economy and protecting our water.

Within the institutional framework for sustainable development, we campaign for the establishment of an ombudsperson for future generations to ensure that there is a high level of engagement of youth in global processes.

Q: What contributions will the Major Group bring to the Rio+20 conference in June 2012? A: (Worth) The two main things our group will bring to the summit are first, our policy contributions and second, the inspiration and motivation for youth activism.

At the moment, we are focused on a whole series of different groups that people can get involved in. We try to cater to a variety of youth around the world who have different interests, skills and abilities. We try to create a space where they can gather and share their ideas.

We build momentum and a social movement that is inspiring and reviving the spirit of Rio.

Q: The first step to build momentum for progress on current global challenges is to draw attention to the topic. How does your organisation inspire others to learn more about sustainable development, and how do you convince them to act? A: (Worth) Recently, we launched a social media strategy, for as youth we have a unique opportunity through access to new social media platforms and different tools to increase the scope of our message.

We are currently working on a strategy to use those different platforms to first create awareness – to inform people about the discussion, about sustainable development, about our focus. Second is to build capacity, once people gain knowledge about the topic, and give them tools to take action.

This builds a movement in two complementary ways: Local action takes into account global perspectives, while you ensure that the global process reflects local perspectives, thus taking into account the differing abilities of people and their diverse interests. You become much more effective.

(Savic) We also make sure it’s accessible to people who have fewer opportunities to participate.

Even if they are physically not there, at the U.N. or in Rio for example, they still have an influence because we have the technology and the ability to bring their perspectives to the table and to address those issues.

Q: What are your expectations regarding the outcomes of the conference and the commitments made by governments? A: (Worth) Touching on the inspiration of Rio, the main expectation especially from my perspective would be that we build that movement and the energy. It is not only about the policy, the dialogue or the official statements, it is about creating the energy and the sense of urgency and the sense of ability to move forward.

By achieving that, then at least we have a young, social, strong and empowered movement that can act on anything we decide to to.

(Savic) I expect us to move away from that materialistic development to a more human and well-being oriented development that actually respects the human rights, economic growth and also the respect owed to our environment.

For me, another important outcome of Rio +20 is forming partnerships between civil societies and governments in implementation. In previous times, due to the lack of that partnership, we were not able to meet agreements and commitments.

It goes the same for governments as for civil societies who were not participating in or held accountable for those agreements.

Excerpt:

The optics surrounding the Barack Obama administration’s “Enduring Strategic Partnership” agreement with Afghanistan and the Memorandums of Understanding accompanying it emphasise transition to Afghan responsibility and an end to U.S. war.

President Barack Obama addresses the press from Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan, May 1, 2012. Credit: White House photo by Pete Souza

But the only substantive agreement reached between the U.S. and Afghanistan – well hidden in the agreements – has been to allow powerful U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to continue to carry out the unilateral night raids on private homes that are universally hated in the Pashtun zones of Afghanistan.

The presentation of the new agreement on a surprise trip by President Obama to Afghanistan, with a prime time presidential address and repeated briefings for the press, allows Obama to go into a tight presidential election campaign on a platform of ending an unpopular U.S. war in Afghanistan.

It also allows President Hamid Karzai to claim he has gotten control over the SOF night raids while getting a 10-year commitment of U.S. economic support.

But the actual text of the agreement and of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on night raids included in it by reference will not end the U.S. war in Afghanistan, nor will they give Karzai control over night raids.

The Obama administration’s success in obscuring those facts is the real story behind the ostensible story of the agreement.

Obama’s decisions on how many U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan in 2014 and beyond and what their mission will be will only be made in a “Bilateral Security Agreement” still to be negotiated. Although the senior officials did not provide any specific information about those negotiations in their briefings for news media, the Strategic Partnership text specifies that they are to begin the signing of the present agreement “with the goal of concluding within one year”.

That means Obama does not have to announce any decisions about stationing of U.S. forces in Afghanistan before the 2012 presidential election, allowing him to emphasise that he is getting out of Afghanistan and sidestep the question of a long-term commitment of troops in Afghanistan.

The Bilateral Security Agreement will supersede the 2003 “Status of Forces” agreement with Afghanistan, according to the text. That agreement gives U.S. troops in Afghanistan immunity from prosecution and imposes no limitations on U.S. forces in regard to military bases or operations.

Last month’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on night raids was forced on the United States by Karzai’s repeated threat to refuse to sign a partnership agreement unless the United States gave his government control over any raids on people’s homes. Karzai’s insistence on ending U.S. unilateral night raids and detention of Afghans had held up the agreement on Strategic Partnership for months.

But Karzai’s demand put him in direct conflict with the interests of one of the most influential elements of the U.S. military: the SOF. Under Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. war strategy in Afghanistan came to depend heavily on the purported effectiveness of night raids carried out by SOF units in weakening the Taliban insurgency.

CENTCOM officials refused to go along with ending the night raids or giving the Afghan government control over them, as IPS reported last February.

The two sides tried for weeks to craft an agreement that Karzai could cite as meeting his demand but that would actually change very little.

In the end, however, it was Karzai who had to give in. What was done to disguise that fact represents a new level of ingenuity in misrepresenting the actual significance of an international agreement involving U.S. military operations.

The MOU was covered by cable news as a sea change in the conduct of military operations. CNN, for example, called it a “landmark deal” that “affords Afghan authorities an effective veto over controversial special operations raids.”

But a closer reading of the text of the MOU as well as comments on by U.S. military officials indicate that it represents little, if any, substantive change from the status quo.

The agreement was negotiated between the U.S. military command in Kabul and Afghan Ministry of Defence, and lawyers for the U.S. military introduced a key provision that fundamentally changed the significance of the rest of the text.

In the first paragraph under the definition of terms, the MOU says, “For the purpose of this Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), special operations are operations approved by the Afghan Operational Coordination Group (OCG) and conducted by Afghan Forces with support from U.S. Forces in accordance with Afghan laws.”

That carefully crafted sentence means that the only night raids covered by the MOU are those that the SOF commander responsible for U.S. night raids decides to bring to the Afghan government. Those raids carried out by U.S. units without consultation with the Afghan government fall outside the MOU.

Coverage of the MOU by major news media suggesting that the participation of U.S. SOF units would depend on the Afghan government simply ignored that provision in the text.

But Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters flatly Apr. 9 that Karzai would not have a veto over night raids. “It’s not about the U.S. ceding responsibility to the Afghans,” he said.

Kirby would not comment on whether those SOF units which operated independently of Afghan units would be affected by the MOU, thus confirming by implication that they would not.

Kirby explained that the agreement had merely “codified” what had already been done since December 2011, which was that Afghan Special Forces were in the lead on most night raids. That meant that they would undertake searches within the compound.

The U.S. forces have continued, however, to capture or kill Afghans in those raids.

The disparity between the reality of the agreement and the optics created by administration press briefings recalls Obama’s declarations in 2009 and 2010 on the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq and an end to the U.S. war there, and the reality that combat units remained in Iraq and continued to fight long after the Sep. 1, 2010 deadline Obama he had set for withdrawal had passed.

Fifty-eight U.S. servicemen were killed in Iraq after that deadline in 2010 and 2011.

But there is a fundamental difference between the two exercises in shaping media coverage and public perceptions: the Iraq withdrawal agreement of 2008 made it politically difficult, if not impossible, for the Iraqi government to keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond 2011.

In the case of Afghanistan, however, the agreements just signed impose no such constraints on the U.S. military. And although Obama is touting a policy of ending U.S. war in Afghanistan, the U.S. military and the Pentagon have public said they expect to maintain thousands of SOF troops in Afghanistan for many years after 2014.

Obama had hoped to lure the Taliban leadership into peace talks that would make it easier to sell the idea that he is getting out of Afghanistan while continuing the war. But the Taliban didn’t cooperate.

Obama’s Kabul speech could not threaten that U.S. SOF units will continue to hunt them down in their homes until they agree to make peace with Karzai. That would have given away the secret still hidden in the U.S.-Afghan “Enduring Strategic Partnership” agreement.

But Obama must assume that the Taliban understand what the U.S. public does not: U.S. night raids will continue well beyond 2014, despite the fact that they ensure enduring hatred of U.S. and NATO troops.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

By Judith Scherr
OAKLAND, California, May 2 2012 (IPS)

It was May Day and Oakland was bathed in sunshine. Union workers staged militant actions; immigrants and allies marched for justice with brass bands and drummers; spontaneous street parties erupted.

There was also tear gas, flash bang grenades, screams, vandalism and arrests on Oakland Streets.

“Today, as we stand in solidarity with labour, as we stand in solidarity with immigrant workers, as we strike against this exploitative economic system, we also stand up to police violence and state repression,” Laleh Behbehanian of the Occupy Oakland Anti- Repression Committee told a rally in Oscar Grant Plaza, the space renamed by protesters for a young unarmed African American man killed by a transit police officer.

Behbehanian went on to say that Oakland sometimes gets blamed for over-focusing on police violence and “diverting the occupy movement away from its original goals.”

She addressed critics, saying, “Oakland has always stood to remind this country and the larger Occupy Movement, that the unfair economic system we protest is maintained every day by massive police violence and military violence all over this world….

“Whenever there is an unjust economic system, there is a police state to defend it….Today that police state is showing its face all over the world. But all over the world, from Oakland to Cairo, from New York to Syria, people are standing up.”

The midday rally got off to a late start, delayed by a police action. According to one protester, “hundreds of people were just hanging out a 14th and Broadway; everything was chill.” They were waiting for a convergence of several small morning marches protesting banks and various businesses.

Suddenly, police “snatched” a woman from her bicycle as she came into the intersection, the protester said, adding, “Really it seemed like it was just to rile up the crowd. That was successful; the crowd was riled up.”

After that, police used tear gas, shot flash-bang grenades and arrested a number of other demonstrators. In a bulletin issued later in the day, police said the demonstrators threw objects at them.

“The crowd surrounded the officers and small amounts of gas were deployed on three occasions in limited areas to disperse the specific small groups of people who were committing the violent acts,” police said.

Most the marches and pickets during the day were accomplished without city permits, but the immigrant rights March for Dignity and Resistance, had permits. The question of whether to take out permits had been contested within Occupy Oakland.

Those supporting a permitted march argued that immigrants, especially those without documents, feel safer with a permitted march. Others pointed out that, when Occupy had permits, as soon as a permit expired – or wasn’t adhered to, to the letter – police had an excuse to make arrests. The final decision, however, was to take out permits.

The rally was held at Fruitvale Plaza, in the heart of the Latino community, where Oakland’s immigrant rights advocates have held May Day rallies and marches since 2006. The atmosphere was festive and brought out many families with children. An Aztec dance troop set the stage and was followed by spirited speeches and then a march that police estimated at between 3,500 and 5,000.

Sergio Arroyo said he had come to support immigrant workers, especially those without documents, who face particular exploitation.

“I’m here to support folks living in the United States who don’t have a support network,” he told IPS. “The majority of workers are guaranteed that they’ll be paid at the end of the day, but there are undocumented folks who get taken advantage of.”

If the employer decides not to pay the worker, “there’s nothing the undocumented immigrant can do in terms of demanding that pay,” he said.

Asked about his support for the Occupy movement, Arroyo said, “We all fall under the umbrella of the 99. We have different strategies – no one’s right or wrong. We do it in our own way.”

Nearby, Emiana stood with friends. She’s a 79-year-old widow who works as a caregiver for elderly people, earning 40 dollars per day for cooking, cleaning, and bathing her clients. She said she even takes care of the dog. The worst is, “They don’t respect me,” she said. She works with National Domestic Workers Alliance and came to the rally to support the caregivers.

In Oakland and nearby Berkeley as well as in eight other Bay Area cities, 4,500 Sutter Hospital nurses chose May Day for their one-day strike action (the hospital locked them out for four more days) and targeted the corporation they work for, saying Sutter has raked in over four billion dollars in profits since 2007 and that its CEO earns 4.7 million dollars annually, while asking nurses to reduce sick leave and pay more for benefits.

Ann Gabler, neo-natal infant care unit nurse and head of the bargaining team addressed some 250 nurses in Berkeley.

“What we’re asking for is to maintain what we have, what we’ve fought for, for over 60 years of collective bargaining,” she said. “I’m not going to let Sutter Health take a magic marker to our contract and black out sections that they don’t like….I love being a nurse….It’s not just about us; it’s about our patients and about our community.”

Sutter issued a fact sheet that indicates that a nurse’s average full time salary is 136,000 dollars per year, and that retirees at 65 with 22 years on the job receive an 84,000-dollar pension for life.

“CNA (California Nurses Association) refuses to partner in efforts to reduce costs for patients,” the fact sheet says.

“Our goal is to balance the need to reduce costs for patients while also continuing to provide our nurses with wages and benefits that are not only competitive, but at the top of the industry for our region.”

At the end of the day, many from the March for Dignity and Resistance returned to Oscar Grant Plaza downtown. In the intersection by the plaza, there was a street party atmosphere, with drummers and a DJ.

Justin Ryan had been at the plaza and various actions most the day. He told IPS he thought May Day had been an opportunity for people with different interests to come together “and protest the general problems with the system and how it inflicts pain on the average person”.

He went on to express concern: “I’m a little worried that people will become destructive in the evening time,” he said.

And, in fact, just after dark, police reported that they had tried to make an arrest and the crowd began throwing objects at them. They said then they disbursed most the crowd. In total, they made 25 arrests during the day. They reported various acts of vandalism including a police car set on fire.

Ryan talked about property destruction. “There’s a long history in the Bay Area of large protests being a cover for people who want to misbehave,” he said. “There’s not really anything we can do – we cannot not protest, because someone will use that as an opportunity to do something you don’t agree with. And there’s always a chance that police or other interests will come and join a march and do things to try to make us look bad.”

Excerpt:

Civil society groups and local politicians are reacting with anger to a new agreement by the United States that would increase its military engagement with the Philippines.

On Monday, U.S. and Filipino delegations met for a first-ever high- level strategic dialogue.

“It is terribly discouraging that the Philippine government cannot figure out a truly healthy relationship with the U.S. – that is, a relationship that allows the Philippines to forge meaningful relationships with America as well as with its neighbours, including China,” Gina Apostol, the author of a novel on the Philippine elite’s relationship with the U.S. military, told IPS.

“We are too stuck on our historical relationship with America, even though it has been patently disgraceful and traumatic.”

On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta met with their Philippine counterparts, Albert del Rosario and Voltaire Gazmin, for a highly anticipated summit, referred to as “2+2”.

The meeting was the first of its kind between the two long-time allies. It was also the most high-level talks yet in a months-long – some would say decade-long – attempt by the U.S. to re-forge strong relations with the Philippines.

The umbrella group Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) is warning that the moves would dangerously increase the Philippines’ dependence on the United States.

“This is the kind of mendicant foreign policy which has prevented our country from developing its own credible defence posture, because it is so dependent on U.S. military aid,” Bayan secretary-general Renato M. Reyes Jr. said in a statement on Tuesday. “The U.S. certainly got more out of this meeting than the Philippines. It’s part of the bigger U.S. agenda in the Pacific.”

While the country is a former U.S. colony and remains one of the United States’ most important Asian allies, bilateral relations soured in the early 1990s. At that time, the Manila government refused to authorise an extension of the agreement that had for decades allowed for the presence of two U.S. military bases in Philippine territory.

U.S. attempts to get back into the country began almost immediately, however, and picked up steam in the aftermath of the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001.

Indeed, the lack of any specific treaty notwithstanding, the U.S. has had troops stationed in the Philippines since 2000, and the two countries have engaged in significant annual joint military training throughout that period. The most recent such actions took place in late April, just days before the recent summit.

Importantly, the 2+2 talks took place as a territorial dispute is escalating between China and the Philippines over islands in the South China Sea – what Secretary of State Clinton recently referred to the West Philippine Sea, enraging Chinese sentiment. For nearly four weeks, both countries have had naval vessels stationed near the islands, called the Scarborough Shoal.

Yet at the talks here, the Philippine delegation told U.S. officials that the Philippines’ military was ill-equipped to deal with any significant action. Del Rosario also noted that this deficiency could pose a threat to future U.S. interests.

“For the Philippines to be minimally relied upon as a U.S. regional partner,” he said during the meetings, “it … behoves us to resort to all possible means to build at the very least a most minimal credible defence posture.”

Gina Apostol suggests that such attempts to appeal to U.S. military strategy could backfire.

“We hope to use American military as leverage, but whose ploy is that, really?” she asks. “We’re simply falling into the hands of a military-industrial complex that is ultimately rapacious and thoughtless of its consequences on the people who mistakenly believe it will be for their protection.”

“Any engagement with America’s military aims is a threat to our sovereignty,” she continues. “But worse than that – it is a threat to our peace.

It is little wonder that the Philippine delegation’s request did not fall on deaf ears in Washington. Following on President Barack Obama’s November 2011 announcement that the United States would be shifting its strategic focus towards Asia, speculation has been widespread over the future role to be played by the Philippines in this changed context – and of China’s reaction to increased U.S. interest in its backyard.

Since the beginning of this year, the U.S. has moved to strengthen the Philippines’ naval forces, while also raising the possibility of rotating U.S. military personnel through Philippine bases. At the 2+2 talks, the United States agreed to give the Philippines a new naval vessel, the second one this year.

Reyes, the Bayan secretary-general, warns that the results of the 2+2 talks do not seem to suggest that any new agreement is in the offing on the U.S. military’s formal role in the Philippines.

“The U.S. will maintain its 600 Special Forces in (the Philippine island of) Mindanao, even without a basing treaty,” he said. “These troops have been in the country for the last 10 years and are believed to be engaged in combat roles.”

Long-simmering public discontent over the U.S. engagement in the Philippines could now crystallise into political implications, including for President Benigno Aquino III.

“Like his predecessors, this Aquino’s administration has allowed the continued exploitation of our country by the U.S. by (agreeing) to unequal treaties,” the League of Filipino Students (LFS) said in a statement Tuesday.

“Not only did these arrangements allow for the easy intrusion of big foreign companies into the Philippines … but also grant U.S. troops entry into the country and (allow for) their stay for an indefinite time.”

Within the Philippine government, too, the prospect of greater U.S. military engagement has been met with frustration. On Tuesday, Representatives Neri Colmenares and Teodoro Casiño told the local media that the government should not be “inviting U.S. meddling”, as it “undermines the Filipino nation’s sovereignty and independence and even brings the country to the brink of war.”

A May Day march in the midwestern city of Minneapolis. Credit: Fibonacci Blue/CC By 2.0

By Haider Rizvi
NEW YORK, May 1 2012 (IPS)

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets here and around the United States Tuesday calling for an end to what they described as the mounting and corrosive influence of money in politics.

“Why let over 18 million homes stand empty when there are three million people without homes?” asked Pham Binh, an activist affiliated with the umbrella anti-capitalist grouping known as Occupy Wall Street (OWS), referring to the mass foreclosures that have swept the country since the financial meltdown began four years ago.

For example, between 2007 and 2009, the profits earned by Wall Street firms increased by 720 percent, while during that same period, U.S. citizens’ home equity was slashed by 35 percent.

On May Day, organisers from a wide array of labour, student and OWS affiliates called a mass march to Wall Street, where many multi- billion-dollar firms operate and influence the U.S. government’s decision-making process though their lobbyists.

At the rally, speaker after speaker raised questions about the lavish spending on U.S. military interventions abroad and drastic cuts in budget expenditures on health and education at home, and the failure to create jobs and alleviate poverty.

“They talk about economic recession,” said Charles Twist, a protester in the crowd. “It’s a manufactured crisis. The postal service says it’s a financial crisis. That’s a lie. They have 75 billion dollars in overpayment for retirees’ health benefits.”

Twist, who has served the U.S. Postal Service for more than a decade, added: “They have all this money, and yet they want to privatise. Basically, there is this one percent of the population at Wall Street who are behind it.

“If the Postal Service was privatised, thousands of communities would be affected all across America. As a postal worker, I know how many people send packages to Ghana, Chile, and Dominican Republic, you name it,” he said.

Sanding next to him in the crowd, Kendall Jackson, who works as a housing rights activist, noted that more than 40,000 New Yorkers are forced to take refuge in so-called homeless shelters. “Why?” he asked, adding, “There are 16,000 among them who are children.”

“The one percent on Wall Street is not only making thousands of us poor and homeless, but also destroying the future of our children,” she said.

“Look at that ugly high-rise,” Jackson said, pointing to a Bank of America branch. “A few years ago, it was a small fabric store.”

According to the Department of Economics at the University of Berkeley, California, New York State rebates 15 billion dollars annually in stock transfer taxes to Wall Street. This potential revenue to the state is lost in the hands of the richest one percent of New York’s population, whose income share is currently 44 percent of total New York State income.

Many protesters held banners and placards highlighting the plight of college students who have struggled to keep pace with rising tuition rates, and the 11 million undocumented immigrants who work long hours to keep their heads above water.

Yoko Liriano, a psychology student at the City University of New York, said she wondered if she would ever be able to complete her studies because she has to work more than 32 hours a week just to pay her tuition.

“I work for six days a week. In addition to pay my rent, I have to pay 700 dollars a month. Just think about it. The U.S. government pays 30 million dollars to the Philippines in military aid. What is that?”

Like Liriano, Dinae Anderson, a high school student in Manhattan, expressed similar concerns about the government’s indifference to the need for investing in education. “It’s becoming really hard to live and work as a student. We have to keep on this struggle.”

At the rally, one college student held a placard reading “F—k your unpaid internship,” a slogan expressing the frustration of millions of unemployed college graduates whose professional skills are often used by employers to make profits but are never paid.

Before the march towards Wall Street, many speakers from immigrant communities voiced their concerns about deportations and lack of labour protections.

“We are all under attack as workers. We are exploited, underpaid and abused. We will march for all people who are oppressed,” said Patricia Francois, a Caribbean domestic worker who has marched on May Day for the last five years.

Since last year, when OWS started a series of protests in New York, hundreds of activists have been arrested and manhandled by police. No incidents took place till the time of filing this report, although the city deployed a heavy contingent of police, including helicopter surveillance of demonstrators.

According to one native New Yorker, this was the largest turnout for May Day he had seen in decades. “We said, no work, no school, no buying. Well, that didn’t (entirely) happen, but look how many thousands of people are here.”

“It’s a good beginning to challenge the one percent who rules,” he said.

Every year on May 1, workers all over the world are officially allowed to take a day off. Many take part in trade union rallies to express their solidarity with the industrial workers killed by Chicago police in 1886 while demanding shorter working hours.

But not in the United States, where the tragic incident took place a more than a century ago.

Excerpt:

By Charundi Panagoda
WASHINGTON, May 1 2012 (IPS)

Thirty percent of food is wasted globally, while one billion people go hungry and another billion are obese.

The current food system is broken and is failing to meet the world’s nutritional needs, says Danielle Nierenberg, “Nourishing the Planet” project director at Worldwatch Institute.

Worldwatch and the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition recently released “Eating Planet 2012” to highlight the challenges faced by today’s food and agricultural system and the benefits of making the system more sustainable, accessible and fair.

“While we talk a lot about the bad news (in the report), the focus is on how agriculture can be the solution for some of the world’s most pressing problems, whether it’s hunger and obesity or youth unemployment. We really think that food and how we produce it and how we eat it is a significant solution,” Nierenberg said.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Farmers don’t make much. Can they afford to be sustainable? Will they be able to mass-produce without the usual fertiliser? A: I think what we are seeing as fuel prices continue to rise, it’s becoming harder and harder for farmers all over the world to afford agriculture inputs that are highly fossil fuel intensive like fertiliser, pesticide and other chemicals. And there really are no signs of fuel prices going down soon.

So I think the whole issue of whether organic or sustainable agriculture can feed the world is not really the question, it’s whether we can continue the food system based on fossil fuel intensive resources. I don’t think it can.

We have one billion hungry people in the world and we have an industrialised agricultural system that’s supposed to be feeding these people, but it’s not. (Various studies) comparing the two show that the industrial system is not making that much more in yield and, in some cases, yields are lower.

We are not feeding with the current system, anyway. So we have to figure out less fossil fuel intensive methods to make sure everyone is fed.

Q: What are some of the solutions you propose? A: In “Eating Planet”, the focus is on nutrition. There is a lot of talk in agricultural development on how to improve yields and what kind of agricultural system is best but there are only a few people who bridge the gap between agriculture and nutrition.

It’s not just about how much food we are producing, but what kind of food we are producing. Are we trying to introduce more varieties of highly nutritious beans, vegetables and fruit? There’s so much focus on the amount of calories we are producing, but no focus on nutrients that are present in those calories. This is why we are seeing things like obesity and diabetes as a global epidemic, not just happening in rich countries but also in poor countries. How can we make the agricultural system more nutritious?

At the World Bank, the nutrition people are not talking to the agricultural people. That sort of thing needs to change. We need to make sure that public health professionals and nutritionists are talking to farmers, food processors and food businesses to make sure the food is as nutritious as it can be.

Q: Let’s consider the U.S. for example. Here nutritious organic food can be expensive and people might not want to pay that much or are able to. How can that be changed? A: A lot of subsidies that have existed in American agriculture in the last 50 years have been focused on industrial agriculture and producing commodity crops like corn and soybeans. Organic food is expensive because farmers are growing it on a smaller scale.

One reason for this is because it’s still not receiving the subsidies the big farmers have. To help small- and medium-scale farmers, we can funnel more of the agricultural funding for farmers who are more sustainable, using less fertiliser and more organic compounds. It’ll help struggling farmers and make it more affordable for consumers.

Q: Fast-food restaurants like McDonalds are now exporting to other countries, changing the eating habits of those people. How would you address that? A: Factory farming or concentrated operations, this agricultural system really started here in the U.S. and in Europe, (and) is now spreading to the Philippines, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia. The environmental, public health and animal welfare impact of this is really extreme. You have huge amounts of waste that can’t be utilised by farmlands, surface fertiliser is becoming toxic waste, there’s tropical water pollution, surface water pollution.

The impact of this fast-food diet in developing countries they weren’t exposed to 30 or 40 years ago is leading to the same types of problems – diabetes, obesity, heart disease and sometimes types of cancer.

The thing about this system is, whether it’s industry farming or the fast-food culture, is that it’s very dependent on cheap sources of grain…Agriculture can’t be seen as sort of an industry, it’s part of the landscape. More than any other industry it relies on clean energy and water.

What we are calling for is a restructuring of the entire food system. One that is more regional and local and relies on resources already available.

Q: How realistic is that? What would you suggest as the basic foundation for a system like that? A: This transition isn’t going to happen overnight. It requires actions from all levels – businesses so that they make their production systems more sustainable, and action from consumers, knowing where food comes from and demanding safe, fairly produced food. We want food that is more animal-welfare friendly.

Finally, policymakers need to push a lot of these changes, without that we won’t see huge investments in agriculture. Really, for the last 30 years agriculture has been ignored by the international donor communities. Now, because of the food crisis, we are seeing a shift to ‘oh gosh, we need to invest in agriculture or we are going to be in a lot of trouble.’

We can’t ignore agriculture any longer whether we are policymakers or soccer moms. We really need to make sure that agriculture is something that sustains and not just some extractive industry.

Excerpt:

The threat of a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities this year appears to have substantially subsided over the past several weeks as a result of several developments, including the biting criticisms voiced recently by former top national security figures of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Ehud Barak.

That a war seems significantly more remote than during the winter months, when tensions reached an all-time high, was confirmed to some extent Monday when the U.S. “newspaper of record”, the New York Times, ran a front-page article entitled ‘Experts Believe Iran Conflict is Less Likely’ .

But, judging by actual bets placed on the on-line trading exchange, Intrade, the chances that the U.S. or Israel will indeed conduct air strikes against Iran before the end of the year have fallen by more than half since the high reached in mid-February – from just over 60 percent to about 28 percent as of Monday.

That’s still a substantial percentage – about twice what it was before the latest round of Israeli sabre-rattling was launched in November.

And it’s difficult to find any close observer of U.S.-Israeli-Iran relations who believes that war clouds could not suddenly reappear, particularly if the next meeting of the so-called P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, and France – plus Germany) with Iran scheduled for May 23 in Baghdad should break down or be delayed.

For its part, the administration of President Barack Obama shown little inclination to reduce pressure – and the threat of military action – on Tehran.

Not only has it moved more minesweepers and F-15 fighter jets into the Gulf region, but the Air Force announced Friday that it has deployed an undisclosed number of advanced F-22 stealth fighter- bombers to the area, specifically to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to the industry publication Aviation Week.

Despite those moves, fears of a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran this year have clearly receded, especially since all sides left the last P5+1 meeting in Istanbul Apr. 14 seemingly satisfied with the seriousness of the exchanges and guardedly optimistic that a diplomatic solution could yet be achieved.

The meeting’s success was made possible by signalling on both sides of their readiness to make concessions on key issues: on Tehran’s part, by stating explicitly that it could halt its enrichment of uranium to 20 percent, transfer its stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium out of the country, and accept greater scrutiny by international weapons inspectors under the right circumstances; on Washington’s, by stating more clearly than ever that it could accept Iran’s continued uranium enrichment of up to five percent under the right circumstances.

Whether the “right circumstances” can be accommodated by all sides, of course, will determine the ultimate success or failure of the negotiations.

Meanwhile, however, those voices, both here and in Israel, that have been most disdainful of the diplomatic route and most insistent that only military action can dispose of the alleged threat posed by Iran’s nuclear programme have found themselves increasingly on the defensive since tensions reached a peak in early March.

It was then that Obama declared to the annual convention of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that “the loose talk of war” by the main Republican presidential candidates was dangerous and counterproductive.

At the time, AIPAC was pressing Congress for quick passage of both a new round of unilateral sanctions against Iran and a Senate resolution that would define the U.S. “red line” for taking military action as Tehran’s development of a “nuclear-weapons capability” rather than the administration’s “red line” of developing an actual nuclear weapon.

“Once the president put the argument about the ‘loose talk of war’, the momentum shifted quite dramatically,” according to Jamal Abdi, policy director of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). He noted that Democrats who had previously bowed to AIPAC’s hawkish line have since become more deferential to the White House.

One token of the change was an anti-war ad run last week by former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, a cheerleader for the Iraq invasion 10 years ago and who is now running to reclaim his old seat. In it, he warned that a war against Iran would make “Iraq and Afghanistan look like a cakewalk”.

“It’s a much different debate now,” Abdi told IPS. “It’s now ‘diplomacy versus war’, not ‘war now or later’.” While sanctions legislation is still pending, he said, “There doesn’t seem to be much of a push to get it done, at least before the Baghdad meeting anyway. Congress is in a kind of ‘wait-and-see’ mode.”

Ironically, the hawks have also been set back by the intensifying appeals by neo-conservatives, in particular, for Washington to intervene militarily in Syria.

Not only has that debate diverted time and energy that many of the fiercest hawks would otherwise devote to Iran. It has also exposed divides, similar to those that surfaced last year over the intervention in Libya, between interventionists on one hand and realists and libertarians on the other within the Republican Party.

“Talking about war with Iran at the same time that you want us to get involved in a civil war in Syria is not a popular message this year,” according to one Congressional staffer who cited recent public opinion polls suggesting that Republicans have become almost as war- weary as Democrats. “Given Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, it’s a bit much.”

Similarly, the unprecedented public criticism by former senior Israeli national security officials of Netanyahu and Barak has given new ammunition to those who favour diplomacy.

In recent weeks, the former head of the Israel’s Mossad spy agency, Meir Dagan, reiterated his long-held views that an Israeli attack on Iran would be “stupid” on the most-watched U.S. public affairs television programme, “60 Minutes”.

His successor and current Mossad head, Tamir Pardo, subsequently publicly questioned whether an Iranian nuclear weapon would pose an “existential” threat to Israel, as repeatedly alleged by Netanyahu.

Last week, the head of the Israel Defense Forces, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, offered that Iranian leaders, contrary to Netanyahu’s views, were “very rational” and were likely to stop short of developing a nuclear weapon.

But perhaps the most damaging attack to date came on Friday when Yuval Diskin, the immediate past chief of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, denounced both Netanyahu and Barak as acting out of “messianic feelings” and predicted that an Israeli attack would likely accelerate Tehran’s nuclear programme.

“I saw them up close, they are not messiahs,” he said. “… My main problem on this issue is that I don’t have confidence in the current leadership of the State of Israel – that (they) could lead Israel into something of the order of magnitude of a war with Iran or a regional war.”

Diskin’s remarks, which were defended by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Gantz’s predecessor, Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi (ret.) at a rancorous conference in New York this weekend, will almost certainly give pause to Netanyahu who, despite his messianism, is also famously risk-averse as a politician, according to Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator.

“He knows that if anything goes wrong (in an attack on Iran), there are very well-respected non-political Israeli figures who will be there to ferociously attack him,” he said, adding that Netanyahu in the coming weeks will likely call an election for September or October.

“That makes the relative unlikelihood of a strike in 2012 even less likely,” he told IPS.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

As the United Nations and countries around the world look at cooperatives as an alternative economic model for the production of energy, rural energy cooperatives have thrived for over eight decades in the U.S., and citizens in some parts of the country are beginning to reclaim them through the democratic process.

Cobb EMC's new board voted to pursue solar energy through a power purchase agreement. Credit: Living Off Grid/CC BY 2.0

There are more than 900 rural electric cooperatives, or Energy Membership Corporations (EMCs), providing electricity to 42 million people in 47 U.S. states.

Georgia has the largest network of EMCs in the nation in terms of the number of customers served, with 42 customer-owned EMCs providing electricity and related services to four million people, nearly half of Georgia’s population, across 73 percent of the state’s land area.

Originally, the EMCs were part of a New Deal initiative to bring electricity to rural areas because private enterprise was not doing it. The federal government provided seed money credit to get them going, and the programme was run under the Rural Electric Administration.

“When the (energy) co-op movement started, it was very democratic,” Seth Gunning, organising associate of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, told IPS.

“Very quickly, though, it was sort of taken over by the same social institutions that run local governments and local businesses, and it sort of turned into this social club thing, that still exists all over Georgia. If you have a brother-in-law that sits on board, and there’s a vacancy on the board, you’re likely to get that seat,” Gunning said.

Most citizens and energy consumers in Cobb County, Georgia, did not realise they were members of the Cobb EMC, or what privileges that brought them, until a recent scandal in which it was revealed that the Cobb EMC CEO and Board of Directors were engaged in racketeering.

Cobb EMC, a non-profit, had created a for-profit entity called Cobb Energy. The EMC contracted out all of its work to the entity at a 12 percent premium, while the EMC CEO and Board of Directors also served in the same positions at Cobb Energy, thus profiting from Cobb EMC.

Instead, the profits are supposed to be returned to the members or to community initiatives of members’ choosing, such as donations to nonprofit organisations or investments in community infrastructure.

A number of lawsuits were filed, included a lawsuit seeking that profits dating back to 1939 be returned to EMC members. Additionally, the CEO was indicted.

This debacle – which seemed like a soap opera, or, even more so, a telenovela – led Cobb EMC members to get involved in the democratic process again.

Community organisations such as the Cobb Alliance for Smart Energy (CASE) were formed. They recruited and vetted reform candidates to run for the Board of Directors, after a judge mandated the EMC hold board elections for the first time in over a decade. At one meeting before the election in September 2011, over 3,600 members showed up to vote on whether to accept mail-in ballots at the election. Prior Cobb EMC meetings had only had a few hundred members to show up.

At the end of the day, after elections were held in November 2011 and March 2012, every single member of the Board of Directors was replaced with a reform candidate.

A few days ago, the new directors held their first Town Hall Meeting for EMC members, and are expected to open up their board meetings for members to attend in the near future.

As a result, in January 2012, the new Cobb EMC Board voted to divest from two proposed new coal energy plants in Georgia, Plant Washington and Plant Ben Hill. Prior to that, Cobb EMC had been part of a consortium of several EMCs called Power4Georgians (P4G), that had planned to build the two new plants.

Earlier this month, plans for Plant Ben Hill were cancelled, in part because the Cobb EMC pulled out of the project. Only four Georgia EMCs remain as part of P4G; plans for Plant Washington remain on the table, but Gunning says he believes P4G will be unable to find an investor willing to take on the project.

Also, earlier this month, Cobb EMC’s new board voted to pursue solar energy through a power purchase agreement, marking a complete turnabout from investment in dirty energy towards clean energy sources for the co-op and its members.

According to Gunning, a very similar turnaround happened with an EMC in Pedernales, Texas, near Austin, and citizens in other parts of Georgia are working to reshape their EMCs.

Despite the difficulties and struggles that citizens have had with their local EMCs, Tom Barksdale, chairman of the CASE, said he still thinks EMCs are a good idea, so long as they are done right.

“I do believe that (energy) co-ops could work in less developed countries or developing countries for the same reason they originally worked in the U.S.,” Barksdale told IPS.

“I think co-ops work, but like any democracy, the members have to pay attention to what they’re doing. In that sense, small is better. They should be set up with specific areas, instead of as massive utilities,” he said.

“The co-op was the idea that neighbours, people who knew each other personally, would get together in relatively small areas to bring electricity to the area. The situation changed when what used to be a few thousand members became like Cobb EMC with over 200,000 members. It became unwieldy and got out of control,” he said.

“The good ol’ boys found out they could do whatever they wanted to and they could get away with it,” he said.

Barksdale also said that EMCs should have “institutional safeguards” such as open board meetings, open records, community meetings in addition to board meetings, and perhaps some government oversight.

“They shouldn’t be able to maintain fiction that they are private; they should be seen as quasi-public,” he said.

In a major address here Monday, John Brennan, the U.S. official in charge of counterterrorism, formally admitted that the United States engages in attacks using armed unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as “drones”.

But, Brennan argued, the drones programme is “legal”, “ethical” and “wise”.

The speech, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, marks the first official public discussion of the U.S.’s highly secretive drones programme. Overseen by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the programme has been stepped up significantly under President Barack Obama.

Brennan’s presentation comes amidst a barrage of events marking the one-year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, with President Obama making much of the event as the 2012 presidential campaign heats up. According to Brennan, “President Obama has instructed us to be more open with the American people about … using remotely piloted aircraft.”

However, that newfound openness has not included an explanation of how potential drone targets are vetted.

Brennan defended the programme in part because, he said, it targets only those individuals who are known to pose a “significant threat” to the United States and constitute a “legitimate … lawful target”.

But he refused to elaborate on how that process of scrutiny takes place. “How we identify an individual naturally involves intelligence sources and methods, which I will not discuss,” Brennan said in prepared remarks.

That type of secrecy, say observers, leaves in the dark one of the most central issues at stake in the U.S. drone programme.

“Unfortunately, John Brennan’s speech today did little to assure us that the U.S. is only targeting those individuals that are directly participating in hostilities against the United States, perform a continuous combat function with Al Qaeda or its affiliates that are targeting us, or pose an imminent threat of harm to the United States,” Daphne Eviatar, a lawyer and researcher with Human Rights First, told IPS.

“Those are the legal requirements for any targeted killing in this context. Brennan, like others in the administration before him, said that the United States is following international law without explaining how it decides whether the individuals or groups of people targeted meet the legal requirements.”

On Sunday, Brennan had already made waves by admitting publicly that civilian deaths are an inevitable part of counterterrorism operations. That issue strikes at the heart of much of the criticism that has built up against the U.S. use of armed unmanned aerial vehicles over the past half-decade.

“For a long time, the narrative was that drones were only killing militants,” Shazad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer, told an international conference on drone warfare that took place in Washington over the weekend.

In Waziristan, in western Pakistan, he reported, “more than 3,000 people have been killed in 300 drone strikes.” Given the lack of independent monitoring, it is unclear what percentage of those people were civilians.

Akbar’s mere presence at the conference was a surprise, and underscored the longstanding secrecy that has surrounded the U.S.’s use of drone technology. Since 2010, Akbar and the organisation he founded, the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, have been representing the families of non-militants allegedly killed by U.S. drone strikes.

For that work, Akbar said, he had been unable to get a U.S. visa for the past 14 months. Ahead of this weekend’s conference, the U.S. State Department is said to have relented only at the last minute.

“President Obama would like us to believe that there are no civilian victims to drone attacks,” Akbar said. “In that, I think he is lying to his own nation.”

Brennan’s talk lauded the “astonishing precision” of U.S. drone technology, but Akbar’s experience on the ground is different.

“There is no truth behind the suggestion that drone strikes are very precise,” he said, proceeding to show documentary proof of several cases of children who were killed while in buildings neighbouring targeted structures.

“Drone strikes are targeting daily life,” he noted. “Attacks take place around dinnertime, breakfast, at night – there doesn’t seem to be any thought given to how to minimise civilian casualties.”

These are just some of the human rights aspects surrounding this new form of warfare, but there are critical political issues unfolding as well.

Relations between the U.S. and Pakistan have been at a dangerously low ebb since two dozen Pakistani soldiers were killed in a drone attack last November. The freeze has included the Islamabad government’s cutting of critical NATO resupply routes through Pakistani territory.

High-level bilateral discussions restarted only late last week, when a U.S. delegation including Special Envoy Marc Grossman arrived in Islamabad. Already, however, relations have soured again.

Grossman’s visit came on the heels of the unanimous approval by the Pakistani Parliament of a set of recommendations, months in the making, on how to redefine the U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

These included a demand for a full apology from the U.S. for the November 2011 deaths, as well as an immediate halt to drone strikes within Pakistani territory.

But following initial meetings with Grossman last week, Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar complained that the U.S. was not “listening … the language is clear: a clear cessation of drone strikes.”

By Saturday, the talks had broken down, reportedly over the U.S.’s refusal to offer a full apology for the November 2011 deaths.

By Sunday, a far stronger message was sent. After a break in attacks of nearly a month, a U.S. drone killed three to four suspected militants at an abandoned girls’ school in Miramshah, in North Waziristan.

On Monday, without making any direct reference to these recent events, John Brennan affirmed that the U.S. “respects national sovereignty and international law”.

Analysts speaking with IPS called the new attack an “embarrassment”, given the timing. Others suggest that the strikes have put an end to the possibility of reopening the NATO supply lines anytime soon.